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7.4 Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)

PLEASE NOTE: This book is currently in draft form; material is not final.

Learning Objectives

  1. Characterize Sonnets from the Portuguese as a sonnet sequence.
  2. Analyze and evaluate Barrett Browning’s “The Cry of the Children” as persuasive discourse.

Biography

PowerPoint 7.1.

Follow-along file: PowerPoint title and URL to come.

Texts

Sonnets from the Portuguese

Barrett Browning’s sonnets were written to express her feelings for her husband Robert Browning. She never intended that they be published but acquiesced to her husband’s opinion that the poems were too good to keep from the world. Various biographers have attempted to explain the title: “Portuguese” was supposedly a pet name Browning had for his wife. Or the title may have been intended to disguise the biographical nature of the poems by suggesting that they were translated from the Portuguese language.

Sonnets from the Portuguese form a sonnet sequenceA group of sonnets exploring all aspects of a topic., a group of sonnets exploring all aspects of a topic, a form of literature that had reached its height of popularity in the 16th century. Barrett Browning uses the form to trace the growth of a love, at first tentative, then more self-assured as the sequence progresses.

Sonnet 43

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.

I love thee to the level of everyday’s

Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.

I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;

I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.

I love thee with the passion put to use

In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

With my lost saints!—I love thee with the breath,

Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and, if God choose,

I shall but love thee better after death.

Sonnet 43 is one of the world’s best known poems. The first line, “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways,” surely figures in the most often quoted poetic lines.

The poet recounts eight ways in which she loves:

  1. Her love is as expansive as the space her soul is capable of reaching.
  2. Her love encompasses everyday moments, by night and day, in contrast to the expansive metaphor of the first “way of loving.”
  3. Her love is freely given. She compares this gift of love to the way men voluntarily strive for the things they believe in.
  4. Her love is pure as the men fighting for their beliefs do so from pure motives, not for glory or honor.
  5. Her love is as intense as the passions she felt in her childhood.
  6. Her love is as intense as the love she thought she’d lost when she lost her childhood “saints,” perhaps a reference to loved ones she lost through death, or perhaps a reference to disillusionment—learning that people she considered “saints” are not perfect.
  7. Her love lasts through “smiles” and “tears,” good and bad experiences.
  8. Her love will last even after death.

“The Cry of the Children”

“Pheu, pheu, ti prosderkesthe m’ ommasin, tekna?”’

Medea

I.

Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers,

Ere the sorrow comes with years?

They are leaning their young heads against their mothers.

And that cannot stop their tears.

The young lambs are bleating in the meadows,

The young birds are chirping in the nest,

The young fawns are playing with the shadows,

The young flowers are blowing toward the west—

But the young, young children, O my brothers,

They are weeping bitterly!

They are weeping in the playtime of the others,

In the country of the free.

II.

Do you question the young children in the sorrow

Why their tears are falling so?

The old man may weep for his to-morrow

Which is lost in Long Ago;

The old tree is leafless in the forest,

The old year is ending in the frost,

The old wound, if stricken, is the sorest,

The old hope is hardest to be lost:

But the young, young children, O my brothers,

Do you ask them why they stand

Weeping sore before the bosoms of their mothers,

In our happy Fatherland?

III.

They look up with their pale and sunken faces,

And their looks are sad to see,

For the man’s hoary anguish draws and presses

Down the cheeks of infancy;

“Your old earth,” they say, “is very dreary,

Our young feet,” they say, “are very weak;

Few paces have we taken, yet are weary—

Our grave-rest is very far to seek:

Ask the aged why they weep, and not the children,

For the outside earth is cold,

And we young ones stand without, in our bewildering,

And the graves are for the old.”

IV.

“True,” say the children, “it may happen

That we die before our time:

Little Alice died last year, her grave is shapen

Like a snowball, in the rime.

We looked into the pit prepared to take her:

Was no room for any work in the close clay!

From the sleep wherein she lieth none will wake her,

Crying, ‘Get up, little Alice! it is day.’

If you listen by that grave, in sun and shower,

With your ear down, little Alice never cries;

Could we see her face, be sure we should not know her,

For the smile has time for growing in her eyes:

And merry go her moments, lulled and stilled in

The shroud by the kirk-chime.

It is good when it happens,” say the children,

“That we die before our time.”

V.

Alas, alas, the children! they are seeking

Death in life, as best to have:

They are binding up their hearts away from breaking,

With a cerement from the grave.

Go out, children, from the mine and from the city,

Sing out, children, as the little thrushes do;

Pluck your handfuls of the meadow-cowslips pretty,

Laugh aloud, to feel your fingers let them through!

But they answer, “Are your cowslips of the meadows

Like our weeds anear the mine?

Leave us quiet in the dark of the coal-shadows,

From your pleasures fair and fine!

VI.

“For oh,” say the children, “we are weary,

And we cannot run or leap;

If we cared for any meadows, it were merely

To drop down in them and sleep.

Our knees tremble sorely in the stooping,

We fall upon our faces, trying to go;

And, underneath our heavy eyelids drooping,

The reddest flower would look as pale as snow.

For, all day, we drag our burden tiring

Through the coal-dark, underground;

Or, all day, we drive the wheels of iron

In the factories, round and round.

VII.

“For all day the wheels are droning, turning;

Their wind comes in our faces,

Till our hearts turn, our heads with pulses burning,

And the walls turn in their places:

Turns the sky in the high window, blank and reeling,

Turns the long light that drops adown the wall,

Turn the black flies that crawl along the ceiling:

All are turning, all the day, and we with all.

And all day the iron wheels are droning,

And sometimes we could pray,

‘O ye wheels’ (breaking out in a mad moaning),

‘Stop! be silent for to-day!’”

VIII.

Ay, be silent! Let them hear each other breathing

For a moment, mouth to mouth!

Let them touch each other’s hands, in a fresh wreathing

Of their tender human youth!

Let them feel that this cold metallic motion

Is not all the life God fashions or reveals:

Let them prove their living souls against the notion

That they live in you, or under you, O wheels!

Still, all day, the iron wheels go onward,

Grinding life down from its mark;

And the children’s souls, which God is calling sunward,

Spin on blindly in the dark.

IX.

Now tell the poor young children, O my brothers,

To look up to Him and pray;

So the blessed One who blesseth all the others,

Will bless them another day.

They answer, “Who is God that He should hear us,

While the rushing of the iron wheels is stirred?

When we sob aloud, the human creatures near us

Pass by, hearing not, or answer not a word.

And we hear not (for the wheels in their resounding)

Strangers speaking at the door:

Is it likely God, with angels singing round Him,

Hears our weeping any more?

X.

“Two words, indeed, of praying we remember,

And at midnight’s hour of harm,

‘Our Father,’ looking upward in the chamber,

We say softly for a charm.[1]

We know no other words except ‘Our Father,’

And we think that, in some pause of angels’ song,

God may pluck them with the silence sweet to gather,

And hold both within His right hand which is strong.

‘Our Father!’ If He heard us, He would surely

(For they call Him good and mild)

Answer, smiling down the steep world very purely,

‘Come and rest with me, my child.’

XI.

“But, no!” say the children, weeping faster,

“He is speechless as a stone:

And they tell us, of His image is the master

Who commands us to work on.

Go to!” say the children,—“up in Heaven,

Dark, wheel-like, turning clouds are all we find.

Do not mock us; grief has made us unbelieving:

We look up for God, but tears have made us blind.”

Do you hear the children weeping and disproving,

O my brothers, what ye preach?

For God’s possible is taught by His world’s loving,

And the children doubt of each.

XII.

And well may the children weep before you!

They are weary ere they run;

They have never seen the sunshine, nor the glory

Which is brighter than the sun.

They know the grief of man, without its wisdom;

They sink in man’s despair, without its calm;

Are slaves, without the liberty in Christdom,

Are martyrs, by the pang without the palm:

Are worn as if with age, yet unretrievingly

The harvest of its memories cannot reap,—

Are orphans of the earthly love and heavenly.

Let them weep! let them weep!

XIII.

They look up with their pale and sunken faces,

And their look is dread to see,

For they mind you of their angels in high places,

With eyes turned on Deity.

“How long,” they say, “how long, O cruel nation,

Will you stand, to move the world, on a child’s heart,—

Stifle down with a mailed heel its palpitation,

And tread onward to your throne amid the mart?

Our blood splashes upward, O gold-heaper,

And your purple shows your path!

But the child’s sob in the silence curses deeper

Than the strong man in his wrath.”

The epigraph to Barrett Browning’s poem from Euripides’s Greek tragedy Medea may be translated, “Woe, woe, why do you look at me with your eyes, children?” Stanzas 1 and 2 begin with questions for Barrett Browning’s readers, directing their attention to the children’s tears. The suffering and sorrow felt by the children is to be expected only in a much older person, one who has lived long enough to experience life’s hardships.

Stanza 4 relates the children’s reactions to the death of Alice, one of the children. The children peer into her grave, noting that there is no room for her to do the work she’s been used to. Alice will never again hear someone calling her from her bed at dawn to resume her work, and the children do not hear her crying from her grave. Based on these observations, in their childish reasoning, they conclude that death is preferable to life.

Stanzas 5 and following address the children’s relationship to nature and to God while always pleading with the reader to recognize the children’s plight. The last stanza addresses the reader directly with a condemnation of a society that allows this situation to exist.

Key Takeaways

  • “Sonnets from the Portuguese” is a sonnet sequence.
  • “The Cry of the Children” is persuasive discourse.
  • “The Cry of the Children” drew on published government documents inquiring into child labor abuses.

Exercises

  1. “The Cry of the Children” falls into the category of persuasive discourse. Who is Barrett Browning attempting to persuade? Of what is she attempting to persuade her audience? Persuasive discourse uses logical (logos) and emotional appeal (pathos); what examples of each type of appeal do you find in this poem?
  2. Read some of the following documents from the Victorian era about child labor:

    Which do you find more persuasive, Barrett Browning’s poem or the documents? Which do you think would have been more effective in convincing a Victorian audience to take action?

  3. Barrett Browning uses descriptions of nature although there is no hint of Romantic mysticism. What is the purpose of the natural descriptions in “The Cry of the Children”?
  4. Barrett Browning also uses frequent references to wheels. What is the literal and metaphorical meaning of the wheels? An apostrophe is an address to an inanimate object or an abstract quality. In stanzas 7 and 8, Barrett Browning addresses the wheels; what is the purpose of this apostrophe?
  5. Compare Barrett Browning’s description of the children and their lives with Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, particularly in the “Holy Thursday” and “Chimney Sweeper” poems. Compare the children’s attitude toward religion in both authors’ works. Compare the line “if all do their duty we need not fear harm” from the Innocence “The Chimney Sweeper” with the last stanza of “The Cry of the Children.”

Resources

Biography

Texts

Audio

Video