Land-locked: Celia Thaxter’s First Published Poem

NOTE: Scroll way down to read the poem

Celia Laighton Thaxter was no shrinking violet, but she lived largely without the social guidelines of the Victorian Era. She worried, from the appearance of her first poem, whether she served the accolades that followed. Her reluctance shows in unsmiling portraits and in letters to friends. 

Celia was more comfortable, she said, with a paintbrush in hand than a pen. Her salon at the Isles of Shoals was attended by the reigning male artists of her age. She would become friendly with the likes of poet John Greenleaf Whittier, painter Childe Hassam, musician Ole Bull, and actor Edwin Booth. 

A rare full-length photograph sent by a reader shows Celia in a cape, her face partially hidden under a huge hood. We know the photo was taken in Boston before February 1861. That’s the date she inscribed on the back to writer JT Morse, Jr, whose collection of 89 “carte de visite” photographs turned up at a flea market in Maine. The date is significant since it marks a month before her first poem, “Land-locked,” appeared in the March issue of the Atlantic Monthly.

READ ABOUT Celia’s caped photo

Judging by Celia’s letters and her poems, this was not a happy time. She was living in Newtonville, Massachusetts with her husband Levi Lincoln Thaxter and their three boys. She hated being away from the Isles of Shoals and her family. The boys were a handful, and her relationship with her out-of-work husband, eleven years her senior, was already beginning to fray. Celia wrote the poem and others in private, but when Levi discovered it, he saw its merit. His wife possessed, according to Celia scholar Jane Vallier, “native genius,” Levi harred her private writing with James Russell Lowell, a prominent poet of the era and the editor of the prestigious Atlantic monthly

She did not know it was to appear until she saw a copy of the magazine. She was paid $10 for the poem, equivalent to about $380 today. Celia was confused by the sudden income and by the knowledge that it must have been her husband who uncovered the poem. He was, after all, the man who had landlocked her unhappily away from her island family. Celia wrote to a friend:

“When I came home, I showed it [the check] to him (the first mention  of the existence of the ‘poem’ which we had made to each other,) ‘Well,’ he said, didn’t you expect it?’ ‘It never occurred to me,’ I replied–and that was all./” 

Levi had been her tutor from the age of 12. Celia was not yet 26 when she signed the mysterious “caped” photo, and perhaps a year or two younger when it was taken. The girl raised in a lighthouse on barren White Island dreaded a life on the mainland. Her plaintive poem is one of the best she ever wrote. 

In the unique photo, Celia appears to be hiding within her gigantic winter cloak. Her face is partially visible inside a coat that appears to swallow her. If ever a poem and a photograph sent the same message, these are. She was sad.

Below is the poem that launched the career of Celia Laighton Thaxter, written in moments stolen between household chores.  

FOR MORE INFO: See Chapter 2 of Poet on Demand by Jane Vallier (A Peter Randall/Downeast book, 1982)

LAND-LOCKED
By Celia Laighton Thaxter

Black lie the hills; swiftly doth daylight flee;
        And, catching gleams of sunset’s dying smile,
        Through the dusk land for many a changing mile
The river runneth softly to the sea.

O happy river, could I follow thee!
        O yearning heart, that never can be still!
        O wistful eyes, that watch the steadfast hill,
Longing for level line of solemn sea!

Have patience; here are flowers and songs of birds,
        Beauty and fragrance, wealth of sound and sight,
        All summer’s glory thine from morn till night,
And life too full of joy for uttered words.

Neither am I ungrateful; but I dream
        Deliciously how twilight falls to-night

        Over the glimmering water, how the light
Dies blissfully away, until I seem

To feel the wind, sea-scented, on my cheek,
        To catch the sound of dusky flapping sail
        And dip of oars, and voices on the gale
Afar off, calling low, — my name they speak!

O Earth! Thy summer song of joy may soar
      Ringing to heaven in triumph. I but crave
      The sad, caressing murmur of the wave
That breaks in tender music on the shore.