4 quotations linked to A Child's Grave at Florence by or associated with Elizabeth Barrett Browning, with source notes, explanations and related topics.
Child bereavement, family grief, winter and flower imagery, Christian faith, patience, hope and carrying sorrow forward.
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“For us, to hope and bear on.”
The short clause gives the bereaved survivors a modest task: continue carrying the loss while keeping some form of hope available.
Source note: “A Child’s Grave at Florence,” stanza XXIX; Project Gutenberg #31015. The surrounding stanza contrasts the family’s earthly grave and silence with the child’s imagined heavenly life.
“Love, strong as Death, shall conquer Death, Through struggle made more glorious.”
The bereavement poem turns enduring love into a religious claim that loss does not exhaust the relationship or its hoped-for future.
Source note: “A Child’s Grave at Florence,” stanza XXIII; Project Gutenberg #31015. This is Christian elegiac conviction, not empirical evidence about death or grief outcomes.
“But winter kills the orange-buds, The gardens in the frost are, And all the heart dissolves in floods, Remembering we have lost her.”
Winter garden imagery gives the family’s bereavement a seasonal landscape, joining visible frost to the emotional force of remembering the child.
Source note: “A Child’s Grave at Florence,” stanza XV; Project Gutenberg #31015. The natural image belongs to an elegy for a specific child rather than a general theory of grief.
“But God gives patience, Love learns strength, And Faith remembers promise, And Hope itself can smile at length On other hopes gone from us.”
The elegy moves from a family’s acute loss toward a specifically Christian vocabulary of patience, strengthened love, remembered promise and slowly returning hope.
Source note: “A Child’s Grave at Florence,” stanza XXII; Project Gutenberg #31015. The poem commemorates a child who died in 1849 and frames consolation through Christian faith.