Sometimes our mistakes can be revealing. The way we read books can be instructive about the way we read others, ourselves, life in general. My thoughts returned to my mistaken reading of Robert Louis Stevenson’s dedication of A Child’s Garden of Verses often yesterday. It seems so obvious, looking at the poem now, that it couldn’t have referred to his mother. Here’s the poem in entirety, with boldface on the parts that plainly indicate that he’s speaking not of a mother, but a nurse:

To Alison Cunningham
From Her Boy

For the long nights you lay awake
And watched for my unworthy sake
For your most comfortable hand
That led me through the uneven land:
For all the story-books you read:
For all the pains you comforted:
For all you pitied, all you bore,
In sad and happy days of yore:—
My second Mother, my first Wife,
The angel of my infant life—
From the sick child, now well and old,
Take, nurse, the little book you hold!

And grant it, Heaven, that all who read
May find as dear a nurse at need,
And every child who lists my rhyme,
In the bright, fireside, nursery clime,
May hear it in as kind a voice
As made my childish days rejoice!

There’s more on Alison Cunningham here. 

The interesting question is, how did I reconcile these clues in the poem to my notion that Stevenson was describing his mother? And perhaps more interesting, why did I assume it was his mother, and wrench the text to fit my preconceived notion?

The answer I come to is the longstanding perfectionism of my inner world. Along with his reference to himself as “her boy,” I assumed this was Stevenson talking about his mother because:

• She meets a standard of selflessness that’s part of my ideal of motherhood;
• She’s kind, forbearing, pitying, enduring;
• She’s a healing presence, a “nurse”;
• She’s (simply put, and Stevenson says it himself) an “angel.”

If these are my criteria of motherhood, is it conscious? Well, no; my conscious criteria have more to do with being honest and real and loving and human, not a celestial being. But at the deeper level where I really live, yes; this must be what I’m aiming for, or why would I have interpreted the poem in the way I did rather than scratching my head and asking, “Who’s he talking about?”

Because I assumed this to be a description of motherhood, I was willing to work pretty hard to twist the text. I never questioned that “nurse” was always a synonym for “mother”; the reference to a “second mother” I wondered about but assumed it had some private meaning to Stevenson; the reference to “first wife” I assumed was an Oedipal thing; the blatant fact that she had a different last name I assumed meant his father had died and she had remarried — all of this without any investigation of the facts.

Good grief!

All of this matters to me as a reader not just of poems, but of life. How often to I perform mental gymnastics rather than realize my assumptions need questioning and revising? How often do I settle for confusion without even thinking about it? How often do I aim for an ideal, and let perfectionism blind me?

By the way, Stevenson’s poem for his actual mother is here — and strikingly devoid of the rhapsodic devotion of the lines to Alison Cunningham.