abolitionism in 'The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point.' In later poems she took up the cause of the risorgimento, the movement to unify Italy as a nation-state, in which Italy's struggle for freedom and identity found resonance with her own.
For many years Elizabeth Barrett Browning was best-known for her Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850), a sequence of forty-four sonnets presented under the guise of a translation from the Portuguese language, in which she recorded the stages of her love for Bobert Browning. But increasingly, her verse novel Aurora Leigh (1857) has attracted critical attention. The poem depicts the growth of a woman poet and is thus, as Cora Kaplan observes, the first work in English by a woman writer in which the heroine herself is an author. When Barrett Browning first envisioned the poem, she wrote, 'My chief intention just now is the writing of a sort of novel-poem . . . running into the midst of our conventions, and rushing into drawing-rooms and the like 'where angels fear to tread'; and so, meeting face to face and without mask the Humanity of the age, and speaking the truth as I conceive of it out plainly.' The poem is a portrait of the artist as a young woman committed to a socially inclusive realist art. It is a daring work both in its presentation of social issues concerning women and in its claims for Aurora's poetic vocation; on her twentieth birthday, to pursue her career as a poet, Aurora refuses a proposal of marriage from her cousin Bomney, who wants her to be his helpmate in the liberal causes he has embraced. Later in the poem, she rescues a fallen woman and takes her to Italy, where they settle together and confront a chastened Bomney.
Immensely popular in its own day, Aurora Leigh had extravagant admirers (like Buskin, who asserted that it was the greatest poem written in English) and critics who found fault with both its poetry and its morality. With its crowded canvas and
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THE CRY OF THE CHILDREN / 1079
melodramatic plot, it seems closer to the novel than to poetry, but it is important to view the poem in the context of the debate about appropriate poetic subject matter that engaged other Victorian poets. Unlike Matthew Arnold, who believed that the present age had not produced actions heroic enough to be the subject of great poetry, and unlike Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who used Arthurian legend to represent contemporary concerns, Barrett Browning felt that the present age contained the materials for an epic poetry. Virginia Woolf writes that 'Elizabeth Barrett was inspired by a flash of true genius when she rushed into the drawing-room and said that here, where we live and work, is the true place for the poet.' Aurora Leigh succeeds in giving us what Woolf describes as 'a sense of life in general, of people who are unmistakably Victorian, wrestling with the problems of their own time, all brightened, intensified, and compacted by the fire of poetry. . . . Aurora Leigh, with her passionate interest in social questions, her conflict as artist and woman, her longing for knowledge and freedom, is the true daughter of her age.'
Th e Cry of the Children1 '<Pev, <j>ev, t'l npoodepKEods fx' ouuaoiv, tekvo.;' ?Medea2 510Do 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. 1520Do 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? bitterly
1. Barrett Browning wrote 'The Cry of the Chil-below. dren' in response to the report of a parliamentary 2. Alas, my children, why do you look at me? commission, to which her friend R. H. Home con-(Greek), from Euripides' tragedy Medea. Medea tributed, on the labor of children in mines and fac-speaks these lines before killing her children in tories. Many of the details of Barrett Browning's vengeance against her husband, who has taken a poem derive from the report. See 'Industrialism: new wife. (The poem's title is spoken by the cho- Progress or Decline?' in Victorian Issues, p. 1556 rus.)
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108 0 / ELIZABET H BARRET T BROWNIN G 253035 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.' 'True,' say the children, 'it may happen That we die before our time: 404550Little 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.' frost church 55(>oAlas, alas, the children! they are seeking Death in life, as best to have: They are binding up their hearts away from breaking, With a ceremen0 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?3 shroud Leave us quiet in the dark of the coal-shadows, From your pleasures fair and fine! 6570 '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,
3. A commissioner mentions the fact of weeds being thus confounded with the idea of flowers [Barrett Browning's note].
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TH E CR Y O F TH E CHILDRE N / 108 1 75The 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. so85'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!' ' 90Ay, 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: 95IOO 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. 105noNow 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
