'The Earliest of My Friends Is Gone'

I often speak or exchange texts with my nephew. Soon he’ll turn thirty-six, but he lives in Cleveland, 1,200 miles away, and I seldom see him. Distance warps the sense of duration, so I think of him as frozen in his early twenties. We spoke on Sunday and for the first time since my brother’s death last August, we didn’t even mention his father. When I realized this afterwards I felt a pang of guilt, as though I were forgetting him. But attending to the living supersedes our obligations to the dead. They don’t constitute a cult to be worshipped. They live in memory and in that way we weigh their losses and honor them. On February 24, 1854, Walter Savage Land0r's sister Elizabeth died after suffering a stroke. She was seventy-seven. A month later he wrote a poem about her titled “March 24”: 

“Sharp crocus wakes the froward year;

In their old haunts birds reappear;

From yonder elm, yet black with rain,

The cushat looks deep down for grain

Thrown on the gravel-walk; here comes

The redbreast to the sill for crumbs.

Fly off! fly off! I can not wait

To welcome ye, as she of late.

The earliest of my friends is gone.

Alas! almost my only one!

The few as dear, long wafted o’er,

Await me on a sunnier shore.”

 

Some glosses: “froward,” despite what my spell-check software tells me, is not a typo. Here is the OED definition, which is applicable to Landor himself -- “disposed to go counter to what is demanded or what is reasonable; perverse, difficult to deal with, hard to please; refractory, ungovernable.” "Cushat" is Scottish and northern England dialect for a wood pigeon or ring-dove.

In his 1954 biography of Landor, R.H. Super writes of him after Elizabeth's death: "He told [John] Forster [his friend and first biographer] that the loss of his earliest, dearest, and nearly his last friend had deprived him of sleep, appetite, digestion, everything."