Eleanor Agnes Lee

Eleanor Agnes Lee Poems

Eleanor Agnes Lee Biography

Eleanor Agnes Lee or "Wig"(as she liked to be known) was one of seven children. She was born in 1841 as the daughter of the Robert E. Lee who would go on to become a major Confederate General in the American Civil War. Agnes spent much of her time in reading, studying, playing piano and in working in her garden. Agnes kept a fascinating journal during her childhood years, later published and entitled Growing Up in the 1850s. Before leaving for boarding school in 1855, she and her sister Annie had a tutor, Miss Sue Poor, from whom they learned their love of music, English , French, and probably arithmetic. For a time Eleanor helped to instruct the Arlington slaves by conducting a Sunday evening school for them and by instructing individual children before and after breakfast. She was religious and was confirmed in the Episcopal Church in 1857. She was a charming and attractive young lady, and there is some evidence that she felt a romantic attachment to Orton A. Williams, her mother's young cousin and a frequent visitor at Arlington, just before the Civil War. Her father is said to have frowned upon the romance because he regarded young Williams as too unsettled to marry. Thought to be somewhat reserved and aloof after the war by her family, this may have been caused by the tragic death of Orton Williams in 1862, and to her own serious illness in 1865, Considered her mother's favorite daughter, Agnes never married and died from typhoid fever in October 1873 at the age of 32.)

The Best Poem Of Eleanor Agnes Lee

Motherhood

Mary,the Christ long slain,passed silently,
Following the children joyous astir
Under the cedrus and the olive tree,
Pausing to let their laughter float to her--
Each voice an echo of a voice more dear,
She saw a little Christ in every face.

Then came another woman gliding near
To watch the tender life which filled the place.
And Mary sought the woman's hand and spoke:
' I know thee not, yet know thy memory tossed
With all a thousand dreams their eyes evoke
Who bring to thee a child beloved and lost.

' I ,too, have rocked my Little One.
And He was fair !
Oh, fairer than the fairest sun
And , like its rays through amber spun,
His sun-bright hair.
Still I can see it shine and shine.'
Even so, the woman said, 'was mine.'

' His ways were ever darling ways'-
And Mary smiled -
So soft, so clinging ! Glad relays
Of love were all His precious days.
My Little Child !
My vanished star ! My music fled ! '
' Even so was mine,' the woman said.

And Mary whispered : Tell me, thou
Of thine.' And she :
' Oh, mine was rosy as a bough
Blooming with roses, sent, somehow,
To bloom for me !
His balmy fingers left a thrill
Deep in my breast that warms me still. '

Then she gazed down some wilder,darker hour,
And said -when Mary questioned, not knowing :
Who art thou, mother of so sweet a flower?'--
' I am the mother of Iscariot.'

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