The Secret Longings of the Secret Garden

“Is the spring coming?" he said. "What is it like?"... "It is the sun shining on the rain and the rain falling on the sunshine...”

Let me read my literary analysis of The Secret Garden to you!
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C. S. Lewis said “No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally—and often far more—worth reading at the age of fifty or beyond.”  The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett still holds our attention even 113 years after it was first printed.

Mary Lenox is a little girl, born in India, who’s parents had no interest in her, and when they die, she did not feel sorrow because she never felt love, from them or for them.

She is sent to England to live with her uncle Archibald Craven. Even in his spacious English manor, she is still alone because her uncle has suffered his own loss and has forgotten how to love. The house holds its own secrets and often, Mary can hear far away cries, doors shut in unknown hallways, and anxious whispers.

Mary is treated kindly by Martha, the maid, despite her own demanding and cold temperament, and through Martha, she hears the story of Archibald and Lilias, her aunt who had kept a rose garden and spent hours and hours in it and that she died there in an accident. The garden has become lost and Mary is determined to find it. Mary was very much like that lost garden; she was shut up with walls, a locked heart and a lost key.

It’s actually her friendship with a robin, her first ever friendship that begins to awaken her heart.

“She stopped and listened to him and somehow his cheerful, friendly little whistle gave her a pleased feeling--even a disagreeable little girl may be lonely, and the big closed house and big bare moor and big bare gardens had made this one feel as if there was no one left in the world but herself. If she had been an affectionate child, who had been used to being loved, she would have broken her heart, but even though she was "Mistress Mary Quite Contrary" she was desolate, and the bright-breasted little bird brought a look into her sour little face which was almost a smile. She listened to him until he flew away. He was not like an Indian bird and she liked him and wondered if she should ever see him again. Perhaps he lived in the mysterious garden and knew all about it.”

The robin shows her where the garden is, and reveals the location of the lost key that had been buried.  With her entrance to the garden, something awakens inside of her that she has never felt before: a longing for beauty. She can tell that the garden used to be beautiful but someone locked it and let it die and buried all the memories of it when they buried the key.

Dicken, Martha’s brother befriends her.  Dicken is steady and even and is a wealth of knowledge about wildlife and plants, two subjects that Mary had no interest in until she came to Misselthwaite Manor and the garden. This is the beginning of a second longing: for friendship. She feels for the first time the give and take of friendship, that in order to maintain friendship, she has to keep her own door unlocked. Her heart is slowly softening from her time in the garden, and her friendship with Robin Redbreast.

But she wants to own the garden, to have freedom there so she makes a strange request from her uncle. She asks for “a bit of earth” to plant things in, to see them grow. “You remind me of someone else who loved the earth and things that grow. When you see a bit of earth you want,” (he says) with something like a smile, “take it, child, and make it come alive.”

With Dicken, she begins to plant seeds and to work and tend the hard dry ground that has long been dormant in the garden.  Again, like her heart, she began to see softness and life where it had only been hard and dead, to begin to see beauty where there was only pain and emptiness. Every day new buds are showing and bulbs are pushing through the soil.

One night, she follows the sounds of the crying that she hears so often and meets her cousin Colin, who she had never known about. In fact, Colin is the same age and their mother’s were sisters. Colin’s father can’t bear to see him because of his own pain in the loss of Colin’s mother and Colin has become weak, sickly and frustrated from being kept inside and cared for only by nurses and the servants. Mary believes he is capable of much more and begins to push him to strive against his weak will. May be Mary sees in him the same weakness that she suffered from before she found the robin, the garden and Dicken.

Dicken, Mary and Colin conspire to get him out of his sick room into the great outdoors and into the garden where his body as well as his spirit begin to strengthen and grow. He begins to feel a sense of hope in life, and becomes determined to try to walk again.

“They always called it Magic and indeed it seemed like it in the months that followed—the wonderful months—the radiant months—the amazing ones. Oh! the things which happened in the garden!”

All the while, something was happening to Archibald Craven. While Colin’s mother was alive, the secret garden was her favorite place to be and when she died,  Mr. Craven couldn’t bear to see it alive when the one who loved it was dead. So he had locked it, buried the key and then hid himself from everything that cause him remembrance of her. He left the garden, his home, his duty and even their son that he believed he could never love. But as the garden and Colin began to come back to life, so did Archibald Craven. Archibald has a dream that his wife is calling to him from the garden.

“As he sat gazing into the clear running of the water, Archibald Craven gradually felt his mind and body both grow quiet, as quiet as the valley itself. He did not know how long he sat there or what was happening to him, but at last he moved as if he were awakening and he got up slowly and stood on the moss carpet, drawing a long, deep, soft breath and wondering at himself. Something seemed to have been unbound and released in him, very quietly. “What is it?” he said, almost in a whisper, and he passed his hand over his forehead. “I almost feel as if—I were alive!”

The last longing that the secret garden awakens is love. Archibald Craven thought he could never love again, Colin never experienced his love and Mary had never been loved.  But when Archibald came alive again, he began to hope. He hoped he wasn’t too late to love his son and he fixes in his mind that he will find the lost key. He must get back into the garden.

He follows his path back to Misselthwaite Manor and finds the garden full of beauty and life and there in the middle, he finds his own son, the reflection of his beautiful wife that he had loved so much.

“ ‘It was the garden that did it—and Mary and Dicken and the creatures—and the Magic.’ He said it all so like a healthy boy—his face flushed, his words tumbling over each other in his eagerness—that Mr. Craven’s soul shook with unbelieving joy.

“Take me into the garden, my boy,” he said at last. “And tell me all about it.”

And so they led him in.

The place was a wilderness of autumn gold and purple and violet blue and flaming scarlet and on every side were sheaves of late lilies standing together—lilies which were white or white and ruby. He remembered well when the first of them had been planted that just at this season of the year their late glories should reveal themselves. Late roses climbed and hung and clustered and the sunshine deepening the hue of the yellowing trees made one feel that one stood in an embowered templed of gold.The newcomer stood silent just as the children had done when they came into its grayness. He looked round and round.

“I thought it would be dead,” he said.

“Mary thought so at first,” said Colin. “But it came alive.’ “

This story will probably awaken in you the longing for beauty, friendship, and love as well as a beautiful secret garden of your own.