Ringing Ballads, Including Curfew Must not Ring To-night
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(Excerpt from The White Lady of La Jolla
The world pays t...)
Excerpt from The White Lady of La Jolla
The world pays tribute to thy magic charm, Gigantic offspring of the century, And lays its treasures in thy outstretched arm. In time of peace, in time of war's alarm, A Nation looks to thee.
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Rose Hartwick Thorpe was an American poet and writer.
Background
Thorpe was born on July 18, 1850 in Mishawaka, Ind. She was the second of five children of William Morris and Mary Louisa (Wight) Hartwick. After failing in business in Indiana and Kansas, her father moved his family to Litchfield, Mich. , where he managed to make a living as a tailor.
Education
She attended grammar and high school at Litchfield, Mich. When Rose was about eleven she was already writing fluent verse.
Hillsdale College in Michigan awarded her an honorary A. M. in 1883.
Career
An imaginative, receptive child, she was much affected by the few literary influences that reached her. They included "stray gems" from Longfellow, Lydia Sigourney, John Godfrey Saxe, and Felicia Hemans--all poets to whom sentiment meant much. She also pored over the poetry and fiction in Peterson's Magazine, an imitation of Godey's Lady's Book.
In Peterson's for September 1865 Rose came across a story entitled "Love and Loyalty. " It told how Bessie, the beautiful daughter of a forester, saved her Cavalier lover from an undeserved death at Puritan hands as a spy. Because Basil was sentenced to be shot when the curfew bell struck, Bessie sped up the steps of the church tower and by clinging to the clapper of the great bell kept it silent. By her action she gained enough time to plead with Cromwell in person. He reversed the sentence, allowing her and Basil to begin a long life of happiness. Such was the tale Rose Hartwick read in April 1867 and quickly turned into long, regular lines of trochaic heptameter. First she called it "Bessie and the Curfew, " but the words "Curfew must not ring tonight" had haunted her from the start, and she settled on them as the permanent title.
In 1870 she sent the poem to a Detroit newspaper, the Commercial Advertiser, which had already printed some of her verse. It caught on at once. The remaining half-century of her life as an author was in a sense an anticlimax.
She penned--and sold--a poem here and there. In 1881, the year her husband's business collapsed, she was fortunately introduced to the young religious publisher Fleming H. Revell. She brought him samples of her short stories as well as verse, and he liked both. Soon she began combining editorial work with creative writing for him.
Besides editing (and contributing to) such moral monthlies as Temperance Tales, she started to write books. Her first book of fiction for children, Fred's Dark Days, appeared in 1881, and four similar ones followed before the end of the decade. Despite the success of her prose she did not neglect her poetry. Editors of magazines and newspapers continued to accept it. The best of it she collected in The Poetical Works of Rose Hartwick Thorpe (1912), among them her two most popular shorter poems, "Remember the Alamo" and "The Station Agent's Story. " She had the satisfaction of knowing that several pieces proved to be widely appreciated, but she received little money for her pains.
Various kinds of less material recognition, however, came her way during the middle and later years of her life.
Litchfield celebrated her literary contributions with a banner at the Chicago Columbian Exposition; "Curfew" was reported to have become one of Queen Victoria's favorite selections. However, tastes change--even popular ones--and by the time World War I arrived Mrs. Thorpe was on the way to being forgotten. She outlived her reputation, dying of a heart attack at the age of eighty-nine in San Diego, Calif. , where she had made her home for over fifty years. She was cremated there.
Quotations:
As George Wharton James says in his little book on her, "Paper after paper copied the ballad, until all the Eastern states, all Canada, had read it, and boys and girls were reciting it, preachers, teachers, elocutionists, and platform orators were quoting it in part or entire. "
Connections
The year after the Commercial Advertiser carried "Curfew, " she married Edmund Carson Thorpe, a carriage-maker and author of German dialect recitations; they had two daughters, Lulo May and Lillie Maude. For a time married life and the prim mores of the period afforded her little encouragement to write.