Parenting & Family Quote by Robert Williams Buchanan

A child’s deathbed gets dressed in the language of a lullaby, then poisoned with a single, blasphemous address: “Satan, strew Roses.” Buchanan’s power move here is tonal sabotage. He builds a soft, almost sing-song cadence - “Sad and sweet and wise” - that feels like Victorian consolation literature, the kind designed to make grief legible and socially manageable. The rhyme (“reposes/roses,” “eyes/lies”) and the hush of “Quietly” keep the scene domesticated, as if mourning were simply good manners.

Then the poem swerves. Invoking Satan isn’t adolescent shock; it’s a refusal of the era’s default theology of innocent suffering. If a child lies under “Dust” - the most stripped-down emblem of mortality - why should angels get the last word? Addressing Satan to scatter roses suggests a world where even the usual symbols of tenderness have been compromised. The roses become suspect: beauty as adornment for catastrophe, sentiment as an accessory to the unbearable.

In Buchanan’s late-19th-century context, this reads as an indictment of pious narratives that sanitize death, especially the culturally fetishized “beautiful child” in repose. The line doesn’t just mourn; it stages a fight over who gets to interpret the body. If Satan can perform the funeral’s gentlest gesture, the poem implies, then the universe is morally scrambled - and the comfort we take from ritual is less redemption than costume.