Doubting Heart, Adelaide Anne Procter was born on the 30th October 1825 in the fashionable Bloomsbury area of London. Home was a literary haven; her father was the poet “Barry Cornwall” aka Bryan Waller Procter . Many others seemed to treat the Procter household as their own so it seemed inevitable that Adelaide would grow up with strong literary influences. Her eventual fame as a poet did not sit easily with her modest demeanour and she did not care to hear that her fame was greater than her famous father’s. In a typical riposte she said: “Papa is a poet. I only write verses.”
She started writing poetry as a teenager, her first poem being Ministering Angels which was published in Heath’s Book of Beauty in 1843. She then submitted work to Charles Dickens hoping for publication in his own periodicals All the Year Round and Household Words. To ensure that he showed her no favouritism, being a friend of her father’s, she used the pseudonym “Mary Berwick”. Dickens published great quantities of her work, most of which was eventually published in her book Legends and Lyrics.
Doubting Heart by Adelaide Procter
Doubting Heart
Frozen and dead,
Perchance, upon some bleak and stormy shore.
O doubting heart!
They wait, in sunny ease,
The balmy southern breeze,
To bring them to their northern homes once more.Why must the flowers die?
In the cold tomb, heedless of tears or rain.
O doubting heart!
The soft white ermine snow,
While winter winds shall blow,
To breathe and smile upon you soon again.
These many days;
Will dreary hours never leave the earth?
O doubting heart!
Veil the same sunny sky,
That soon (for spring is nigh)
Shall wake the summer into golden mirth.Fair hope is dead, and light
Is quench’d in night.
O doubting heart!
Thy sky is overcast,
Yet stars shall rise at last,
Brighter for darkness past,
And angels’ silver voices stir the air.
