Was poet and artist Celia Thaxter a practicing Christian? In his memoir, “Ninety Years at the Isles of Shoals,” Oscar Laighton offered his view. “We do not find,” he wrote of his older sister, “that she belonged to any church, yet through her verse there breathes the fragrance of a divine faith.”
Homeschooled as a religious skeptic by her freethinking father, Thomas Laighton, Celia combined her worshipful love of nature with elements of Christianity. An 1857 edition of the Portsmouth Journal, perhaps in jest, boldly declared, “Mr. Laighton is a believer in Spiritualism.” There were rumors of seances held at the Appledore Hotel.
Celia Laighton was 16 when she married 27-year-old Levi Thaxter, who was an ordained minister, but rarely employed. After the death of her parents, Celia Thaxter became increasingly interested in Spiritualism. She and her literary friends Sarah Orne Jewett and Annie Fields held mystical vigils, but failed to communicate with their dear departed. As Celia told Annie Fields in a letter, “the consolation of religion” did not bring her the comfort it seemed to give others.
Her real church was her garden and the natural world at the Isles of Shoals, and she loved spring best of all. Each autumn, she reported in her book “An Island Garden,” she moved back to “the picturesque old town of Portsmouth.” Her upper windows in her State Street apartment were filled with “young wildflowers, stocks, single dahlias, hollyhocks, poppies” and other garden plants she tended until spring. On April 1, she transported all her seedlings to her famous garden, still maintained today on Appledore Island.
Celia hated slugs and loved the frogs and toads that ate them. She even imported frogs to the island for that purpose. Early one April, she wrote, while vigorously hoeing her garden, she was delighted to discover a giant half-buried toad. “He had lived all winter,” she reported. “He had doubtless fed on slugs all the autumn. I could have kissed him on the spot!”
Celia Thaxter’s writing is sprinkled with religious references. Her sacred work is rarely read today, but she frequently mentioned Easter, Christmas, miracles, angels, and Christian love. The fact that she often sold her poems to magazines and greeting card companies may, in part, have influenced these themes.
In her book of poems entitled “Heavenly Guest,” for example, she described a man who sheltered and fed a homeless woman only to discover the woman was God. She frequently wrote rapturous verses about the return of her beloved flowers in April, reborn again after each death-like winter on the barren Isles of Shoals. Half a dozen poems in “The Heavenly Guest” hover around the Easter theme, viewing the biblical crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus as a tale of rebirth, forgiveness and redemption rather than guilt. For Celia, her friendly toad was unearthed and reborn each spring.
Towards her own death in 1892, brother Oscar Laighton wrote, Celia Thaxter appeared to have come to favor the Unitarian faith. Whatever the poet’s religion was, her love of nature is everywhere evident in her writing, her art, and her life.
Copyright 2021 by J. Dennis Robinson, all rights reserved
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