Last week, I wrote about losing my mother and finding the poem “Rock Me To Sleep” by Elizabeth Akers Allen (written in 1859), which readers of the “Little House” books will remember Mrs. Bradley singing in Little Town on the Prairie (Chapter 19: The Whirl of Gaiety). I found the poem in the book The Best Loved Poems of the American People Selected by Hazel Fellemen.
I also mentioned that I made a little discovery, which I’d like to share. In this same book of poems, after “Rock Me To Sleep”, is another poem which is in reply to “Rock Me To Sleep”:
Call Me Not Back From The Echoless Shore
Why is your forehead deep-furrowed with care?
What has so soon mingled frost in your hair?
Why are you sorrowful? Why do you weep?
And why do you ask me to “rock you to sleep”?
Could you but see through this world’s vale of tears,
Light would your sorrows be, harmless your fears;
All that seems darkness to you would be light,
All would be sunshine, where now is but night.
Follow me, cheerfully, pray do not weep;
In spirit I’ll soothe you, and “rock you to sleep,”
Why would you backward with time again turn?
Why do you still for your childhood’s day yearn?
Weary one, why through the past again roam,
While, in the future, the path leads you home?
Oh, dearest child! dry those tears, weep no more,
Call me not back from the echoless shore;
In spirit I’ll soothe you and “rock you to sleep.”
The book says that the author is unknown. I did a little sleuthing (google search), which told me that it was written by Charles Carroll Sawyer in 1861. It was also a song with the music written by Henry Tucker.
I suppose it was written to be of comfort, but I really like “Rock Me To Sleep” by itself.