14 Elizabeth Barret Browning

Dr. Neeru Tandon

13.0 Learning Outcomes

In this module we will come to know about great Victorian poet Elizabeth Barret Browning, her life, and her limitations as a poet, her contribution towards the English poetry and her poetic style and output. We will also discuss three of her poems in detail viz. To George Sand: Recognition, To George Sand: A Desire, and The Cry of the Children.

13.1 Introduction

‟Among all women poets of the English-speaking world in the nineteenth century, none was held in higher critical esteem or was more admired for the independence and courage of her views than Elizabeth Barrett Browning. „‟

Elizabeth Barrett Browning alias “Ba” was an English poet of the Romantic Movement. Popularly known as Mrs. Robert Browning, Elizabeth was best known for her love poems, Sonnets from the Portuguese and Aurora Leigh. Her volume, Poems (1844) brought her great success. She was an extraordinary woman who fiercely opposed the slavery on which her family’s fortune was founded, while struggling with lifelong illness. During her lifetime she was held in higher regard than Browning. She was even tipped to succeed William Wordsworth as poet laureate in 1850.

Her Appearance: Elizabeth B Browning was an „attractive young woman with large eyes, dark curly hair, a diminutive figure with an easy smile, and charming to all who met her‟. Her ill health was not a deterant in writing and in 1838 The Seraphim and Other Poems including “Cowper‟s Grave” and “The Cry of the Children”, the first of her works to be published under her own name,established her as a great poetess of her time. It gained critical acclaim and she started correspondences with many literary figures of the day including Thomas Carlyle, Edgar Allan Poe, and William Wordsworth.

She inherited a large sum from an uncle, in 1840, after that she travelled to the fashionable seaside resort of Torquay in southern England to take a rest cure to improve her health. During her stay over there her beloved brother `Bro‟ who had accompanied her, drowned in the Bay.She expressed her grief and guilt in “De Profundis

III

The heart which like a staff, was one

For mine to lean and rest upon,

The strongest on the longest day

With steadfast love, is caught away,

And yet my days go on, go on.

IV

And cold before my summer’s done,

And deaf in Nature’s general tune,

And fallen too low for special fear,

And here, with hope no longer here,

While the tears drop, my days go on.

Barrett was an avid and voracious reader She had gone through the histories of England, Greece, and Rome; Othello and The Tempest; part of Pope’s Homeric translations; and passages from Paradise Lost at the age of nine. At eleven she “felt the most ardent desire to understand the learned languages.” She received some instructions in Greek and Latin from a tutor who lived with the Barrett family for two or three years to help her brother Edward (“Bro”). Barrett was, as Robert Browning later asserted, “self-taught in almost every respect.” Within the next few years she went through the works of the principal Greek and Latin authors, the Greek Christian fathers, several plays by Racine and Molière, Hebrew and a portion of Dante‟s Inferno-all in the original languages. She was influenced by the works of Tom Paine, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Mary Wollstonecraft and expressed that through her poems and letters.

At the age of eleven or twelve she composed a verse “epic” in four books of rhyming couplets, The Battle of Marathon. At the age of twenty Barrett offered to the public, with no indication of authorship, a slender volume entitled An Essay on Mind, with Other Poems (1826). Critics appreciated it but she called the book “a girl’s exercise, nothing more nor less!— ” How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43), written during her courtship with Robert Browning.is probably Barrett Browning’s most famous poem today.

“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

F or the ends of being and ideal grace.”

13.2: E B Browning: A Biographical Sketch

Elizabeth Barrett Moulton, the daughter of Mary Graham Clarke (d.1828) and Edward Moulton Barrett (d.1857) was the oldest of twelve children. She was born on 6 March 1806 at Coxhoe Hall, County Durham, England. Elizabeth lived a lavish life-style with her parents. Her father had a great wealth from his Jamaican sugar plantations. Three years after Elizabeth was born, he bought the 500 acre estate `Hope End‟ in Hertfordshire.

Two years later, Elizabeth developed a lung ailment that plagued her for the rest of her life. Doctors began treating her with morphine, which she would take until her death. When she was fifteen, Elizabeth also suffered a spinal injury while saddling a pony. Despite her ailments, her education continued. Elizabeth taught herself Hebrew so that she could read the Old Testament; her interests later turned to Greek studies and The Bible. In 1826, Elizabeth anonymously published her collection An Essay on Mind and Other Poems. Two years later, her mother passed away.

In 1832, Elizabeth‟s father sold his rural estate at a public auction and settled permanently in London. Then Elizabeth published her translation of Prometheus Bound (1833), by the Greek dramatist Aeschylus.

Elizabeth was shattered emotionally and physically by the death of her brother and great patriot Count Cavour on 6 June 1861.”I can scarcely command voice or hand to name Cavour,” Elizabeth wrote; “if tears or blood could have saved him to us, he should have had mine.” Then on 20 June she was confined to bed, stricken with a severe cold, cough, and sore throat. She died in her dear husband Browning’s arms early in the morning of 29 June.

13.3 Robert Browning and E B Browning

After the death of Elizabeth in 1861, Browning left Florence with his son within a month. She was so loved by her husband that he could not bear her separation and went to London and settled there.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning seems, despite some difficulties, to have enjoyed a very happy relationship with her husband, Robert Browning. According to Kathleen Blake, Robert Browning was practically “a one-man refutation of virtually all of her anxieties.”

Browning was a helpful critic from the beginning, for instance, from his earliest letter commenting on her translation of Prometheus Bound. But E.B.B. was not easily influenced and often stood up for her originality even when people thought it amounted to eccentricity, as they more than once did. On her controversial Poems before Congress she says, “I never wrote to please any of you, not even to please my own husband”. She did not emulate Browning directly because she thought she shouldn’t and because she thought she couldn’t anyway. As Susan Zimmerman has shown, the Sonnets differ from the traditional sonnet sequence in praising the beloved — Browning — as a singer far beyond the speaker in power — he is a “gracious singer of high poems”, while she is a worn-out viol (IV; XXXII).

The courtship and marriage between Robert Browning and Elizabeth B Browning were carried out secretly, for fear of her father’s disapproval. Later her fear proved true and she was disinherited by her father and rejected by her brothers. The couple moved to Italy in 1846, where she would live for the rest of her life. They had one son, Robert Barrett Browning, whom they called Pen.

During the years of her marriage to Robert Browning, her literary reputation far surpassed that of her poet-husband; when visitors came to their home in Florence, she was invariably the greater attraction. The two volumes found their way into the home of Robert Browning. Browning in January 1845 wrote a letter which began, “I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett.” When Browning wrote that first of the many letters that were to be exchanged between the two poets, Barrett had already won an admiring public and was maintaining an extensive correspondence with writers and artists in England and the United States. Browning, on the other hand, was bitterly discouraged because his poetical career was not prospering and his productions on the London stage had proved to be hopeless failures. Six years younger than Barrett, he had abundant energy and good health, dressed as a young man of fashion, and enjoyed going to dinners and receptions where he conversed with many of the leading figures of the literary world. For almost all of his life he had been living at home with his parents and his sister—all three of whom adored him—and was financially dependent upon his father, since none of his volumes of verse had repaid the expenses of publication.

The courtship progressed despite the objections of Mr. Barrett, who wished his children to remain totally dependent on him. During the period of the exchange of letters and of Browning’s visits to her room, she was composing the poems, that we today know as “Sonnets from the Portuguese.”

When Browning proposed her, she instantly reacted that „they must remain no more than friends because of the disparities in health and age. Marriage, she says, would place a severe burden upon him, for the care of an invalid wife six years older than he would necessarily take him away from the varied social life he has been enjoying.‟ She apprehended that his love for her will fade away quickly and will be replaced by pity.This and many more such questions were of no avail as her lover’s eyes spoke much more to remove her doubts as well as her hesitation to accept this relationship.Perhaps her response is in her sonnet of the cycle, “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.”

On 12 September 1846, they got married secretly at St. Marylebone Parish Church. Soon, the couple left for Italy for a warmer climate but after one winter they moved to Florence, where Elizabeth’s lived throughout her life. She gave birth to her only child in 1849- and was named Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning, popularly known as called “Pen,”

13.4 Mrs. Browning’s Limitations

1. Elizabeth B. Browning, England‟s one of the „most original and gifted young poets‟ suffered due to her poor health (weakness of her lungs).
2. Obscurity of language ,„barren themes‟ and lack of closeness with nature.
3. Inspite of the „depth of her intellect, the earnestness of her thought, and the “pathetic beauty” of the romantic ballads‟ Mrs. Browning’s poetry still retained some of the deficiencies of her earlier books, such as diffuseness, obscure language, and inappropriate imagery.
4. Though she was quite favourite of fellow poets and common people, yet professional reviewers did not like her works. Their charge was because of her poems being too long and weak in characterization.
5. Her poems lacked consistency.
6. She used melodramatic and implausible plot.
7.  Unsuitable and inharmonious imagery,
8. Vulgar material, coarseness of its language made her works “almost a closed volume for her own sex.”

Despite its shortcomings the poem gave evidence of its author’s vigorous intellect, her earnestness, and her wide and humane sympathies.

13.5 Her Contribution:

The extremely popular poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning have won her a guaranteed and high place in English literature.She did not like when critics praised her as a “woman poet‟‟ as she prized learning. By 1850 (at the time of Wordsworth’s death,) she was conspicuously declared as a possible successor to the poet laureateship because of her humane and liberal point of view.

In her writings she was passionately outspoken on issues of social injustice like slavery, child labor, and oppression of women. Her influence on Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf was great.

„‟From the time when she had first become acquainted with Mrs. Browning’s writings, Dickinson had ecstatically admired her as a poet and had virtually idolized her as a woman who had achieved such a rich fulfillment in her life.‟‟

13.6-Elizabet B Browning as a poet: According to the Poetry Foundation “Among all women poets of the English-speaking world in the nineteenth century, none was held in higher critical esteem or was more admired for the independence and courage of her views than Elizabeth Barrett Browning.‟‟

13.6 Her Poetic Output and style

Very talented Elizabeth wrote forty-four sonnets in her notebook so secretly that even her husband could come to know about them after three years of her marriage in 1849. He was so impressed with the beauty and technique of the sonnets that he insisted on their appearing in her forthcoming new edition of Poems (1850). In order to avoid any visible connection with their lives, the Brownings selected the ambiguous title “Sonnets from the Portuguese,”The sonnets gradually gained reception by the critics and made her famous as a poet.Besides the “Sonnets from the Portuguese,” the retranslation of Prometheus Bound was another achievement discussed and analysed by the contemporaries. It was considered original without being too concerned with formal rules and details and was explained and expressed in lively English.About it she said; it was the romance she had been “hankering after so long, written in blank verse, in the autobiographical form.” Named after the heroine of the poem, Aurora Leigh was published in 1857. In the dedication to her lifelong friend and benefactor John Kenyon she wrote that it was “the most mature of my works, and the one into which my highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered.” None of Mrs. Browning’s poems has received more attention from feminist critics than Aurora Leigh, since its theme is one that especially concerns them: the difficulties that a woman must overcome if she is to achieve independence in a world mainly controlled by men.

She wrote profusely between 1841 and 1844, including prose, poetry and translation .Her abundant output made her a competitor to Tennyson as a candidate for poet laureate after William Wordsworth died. Within three years after her return to Wimpole Street she had many new poems in manuscript and others already published in journals, and she believed that the time was ripe for their appearance in book form—the first since The Seraphim and Other Poems of 1838. The critical reception of her Poems, published in two volumes in 1844, was such that the author was no longer merely a promising young poet but had suddenly become an international celebrity.

Her frank treatment stimulated controversy of the plight of “the fallen woman”, because standards of sexual conduct were so rigid that any unmarried mother (even victim of sexual agression) was shunned by society. One of Mrs. Browning’s most fundamental convictions was that sexual activity outside of marriage was immoral, but she believed that society should be more compassionate in its treatment of women who had been victims of seduction or sexual attacks. That may be the reason that women readers were stunned by the story of Marian Erle of Aurora Leigh. While on the other hand Swinburne, Leigh Hunt, Walter Savage Landor, Ruskin, and the Rossetti brothers all praised it openly for its merit. „‟From a commercial point of view it proved to be by far the most successful of Mrs. Browning’s works; by 1885, twenty-eight years after its first publication, it had gone through nineteen editions.‟‟(wiki)

Elizabeth tdevoted herself to reading English and French fiction and memoirs and to writing letters, essays, and poetry. She was a private person and only two visitors besides her family could see her in her room: John Kenyon, a minor poet and the well-known writer Mary Russell Mitford. Mrs. Browning experimented a lot with the sonnet. Her twenty-eight sonnets on various subjects were Italian in form (divided between an octet and a sestet), and in all cases the first eight lines rhyme abba abba. In the last six lines, however, Mrs. Browning used two different patterns. Some of the poems end with a cdcdcd pattern; others end cdecde. Elizabeth „occasionally restricts herself to four rhyme values in a single sonnet—abcd.‟ This practice imposes on her vocabulary even stricter limits than those imposed by either the Petrarchan or the Shakespearean form. „Furthermore, the sonnets—some about grief, tears, and work, with two about George Sand—force her to be less diffuse.

13.7 Critics on E B Browning

The well-known critic John Wilson (“Christopher North”) declared that there was beauty in all the poems and that some were “altogether beautiful.”

The poem that found least favor with the critics was “A Drama of Exile.”

The many journals, which reported Mrs. Browning‟s untimely death, spoke of her as the greatest woman poet in English literature.

The highly respected Edinburgh Review expressed the prevailing view when it said that she had no equal in the literary history of any country: “Such a combination of the finest genius and the choicest results of cultivation and wide-ranging studies have never been seen before in any woman.”

In America the most extravagant of the obituary notices appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger, which called her “the Shakespeare among her sex” and placed her among the four or five greatest authors of all time.

A year after her death Browning collected and arranged for publication her Last Poems, which included a number of translations from Greek and Latin poetry, personal lyrics, and poems on Italian politics. In the same year the fifth edition of her Poems was published. Both works were warmly received by the leading literary journals on both sides of the Atlantic as they reviewed her poetic career from its beginning.

A writer in the Christian Examiner of Boston said that Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850) and Mrs. Browning’ Aurora Leigh were the two greatest poems of the age and that the “Sonnets from the Portuguese” were the finest love poems in English.

In 1930, however, Virginia Woolf in an article in the Times Literary Supplement deplored the fact that Mrs. Browning’s poetry was no longer being read and especially that Aurora Leigh had been forgotten. She urged her readers to take a fresh look at the poem, which she admired for its “speed and energy, forthrightness and complete self-confidence.”

In her Literary Women Ellen Moers writes that Aurora Leigh is the great epic poem of the age; it is “the epic poem of the literary woman herself.” It now looks as though Mrs. Browning’s literary reputation will remain secure with future critics who view her work from a feminist perspective.

13.9:To George Sand: A Recognition Elizabeth Barrett Browning

True genius, but true woman! dost deny

Thy woman’s nature with a manly scorn

And break away the gauds and armlets worn

By weaker women in captivity?

Ah, vain denial! that revolted cry

Is sobbed in by a woman’s voice forlorn—

Thy woman’s hair, my sister, all unshorn

Floats back dishevelled strength in agony

Disproving thy man’s name: and while before

The world thou burnest in a poet-fire,

We see thy woman-heart beat evermore

Through the large flame. Beat purer, heart, and higher,

Till God unsex thee on the heavenly shore,

Where un incarnate spirits purely aspire!

13.9.1: To George Sand: A Recognition Background:

In Victorian society, the ideal women had just two roles: marriage and procreation. In Victorian England Elizabeth Barrett Browning was one such educated woman who exercised her writing capabilities to come out of enslavement. Through her poem Aurora Leigh, Barrett Browning addresses the opposing prospects on women saying, “am I proved too weak/ to stand alone, yet strong enough to bear/ such leaners on my shoulder? Poor to think,/ yet rich enough to sympathise with thought?” (1189).

George Sand was a writer who held her head high beside Victor Hugo and marveled at the intellect, style, eloquence and passion in all the novels. Although Elizabeth Browning practically venerated George Sand and held her in high regard for competing so beautifully in the literary world, she remembers in her poem To George Sand:A Recognition that women must not forget their womanhood.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in To George Sand: A Recognition speaks to a woman with a man‟s name. If George Sand is programmed as Mill suggests, to think her characteristics as a woman are opposite a man‟s, then changing her name and doing a male‟s vocation could be the beginning of denying all of her female characteristics. Elizabeth Barrett Browning challenges women to be proud of what they are good at, passion and emotion, while at the same time continue endeavoring for more intellect and recognition.

Morlier argues that through the use of the word “unsex” “Barrett addressed a cliche in antifeminist journalism” as well as the comment made by the American journalists. Barrett Browning redefines this word in her sonnet. In the poem the word takes on a positive, perhaps even holy meaning.

Morlier argues that “To George Sand: A Recognition” contains allusions to the Samson and Delilah story of the Bible and even Milton’s version. She explains how Milton and other writers had redefined the biblical Samson as a controversial hero.

13.10: Critics on To George Sand: A Recognition

In her poem of recognition, Elizabeth Barrett suggests that although a woman can appear to deny her womanhood with “manly scorn”, she will always be a woman (Thomson 208).

Elizabeth Barrett tries to celebrate the successes of George Sand yet remind her that female emotion, female passion, is a strength and not a weakness (Stephenson 101).

13.11 To George Sand A Recognition : Central Thought And Poetic Technique:

Elizabeth Barrett Browning describes her idol George Sand as “True genius, but true woman!” in her poem To George Sand: A Recognition. Elizabeth Barrett considered George Sand a “brilliant monstrous woman” and considered her not only a genius but the only woman she knew of “who was not inferior to men” (Thomson 215). She could relate to George Sand in many ways, both being warm and emotional and radical and moderately feminist at the same time (208). George Sand considered herself to be a poet before a reformer and it was this quality that Elizabeth Barrett, her “English admirer held on to” (208).

The theme of this poem appears similar to E B Browning‟s “To George Sand: A desire”. It expresses the same aspect of George Sand breaking through the gender barrier and becoming a successful female author. However, “To George Sand: A Recognition” uses a much more dramatic tone and really brings to light how much of a battle it was for George Sand to have such a career. It expresses the agony that Sand as well as other women had to go through to be respected in a male dominated field. She also uses vivid imagery to express the triumph of Sand finally breaking through that gender role.

One may assume that George Sand was a powerful motivating feminist figure. Although she was just that, she went about her work very lady like, without ever causing a stir or controversy and writing all romance novels. Her feminine style in such a male dominated era makes her work even more impressive.

In To George Sand: A Recognition, Elizabeth Barrett says a woman‟s rejection of her nature is a “vain denial”. She seems to be scolding George Sand in saying, “thy woman‟s hair, my sister, all unshorn/ Floats back disheveled strength in agony, / Disprovingthy man‟s name”.

13.12: To George Sand: A Desire: The poem and its Critique Thou large-brained woman and large-hearted man, Self-called George Sand ! whose soul, amid the lions Of thy tumultuous senses, moans defiance

And answers roar for roar, as spirits can:

I would some mild miraculous thunder ran

Above the applauded circus, in appliance

Of thine own nobler nature’s strength and science,

Drawing two pinions, white as wings of swan,

From thy strong shoulders, to amaze the place

With holier light ! that thou to woman’s claim

And man’s, mightiest join beside the angel’s grace

Of a pure genius sanctified from blame

Till child and maiden pressed to thine embrace

To kiss upon thy lips a stainless fame.

To George Sand: A Desire is a companion poem with To George Sand: A Recognition In the first poem of desire, Elizabeth Barrett uses George Sand‟s example to tell women to follow one‟s dreams without shame.

“To George Sand: A Desire” is unique in its compliment of the author George Sand. George Sand was considered to be one of the grandmothers in female French poetry by Elizabeth Browning. Browning utilizes her tribute to glorify the remarkable feat Sand accomplished as a woman struggling to break through in a man’s world. In this piece Browning explores the boundaries of the sexes and the walls established in the literary world built to keep women separate and out.

“A Desire” opens with a wonderfully powerful tribute to Sand and in depth look into the sex roles with the statement “Thou large-brained woman and large hearted man.”

In this line Browning compliments George Sand’s amalgamation of intellect and sensitivity in her writings. Further Browning also explores the roles of both sexes in the adjectives she contributes to each sex. In fact this opening line appears as a contrast, after all intellect is associated with women and sensitivity with men. It is no surprise that even at that time women were associated with emotion and men with intellect. Browning disproves this misconception and proclaims that both men and women can be intellectual as well as emotional. The remainder on the first line in this piece draws attention to Sand’s gender identity with “Self-called George Sand.” After all George Sand is the creation of Aurore Dupin (George Sand’s real name) a female author who was willing to publish under a man’s name in order to gain acceptance by her audience.

In the twelfth line of the same poem, Barrett Browning describes Sand as a “pure genius sanctified from blame.” The use of the word “sanctified” here may be a response to Mazzini’s statement. In “To George Sand: A Recognition,” Barrett writes:

Beat purer, heart, and higher,

Till God unsex thee on the heavenly shore

The last line of the piece sanctifies Sand as a genius and even more importantly as a female author with a voice, which will be appreciated by readers and writers to come.

13.13 : To George Sand: A Desire: Central Thought and poetic Technique

George Sand was a celebrity and lived a controversial life because she divorced her husband and family in 1831, a practice uncommon and looked down upon. She changed her name from Aurore Dudevant to George Sand, wore men’s clothes, and had numerous love affairs with such prominent figures. French and English critics alike constantly attacked her work. Elizabeth Barrett Browning responded to such criticism in her “To George Sand” sonnets.

Thou large-brained woman and large-hearted man,

Self-called George Sand! Whose soul, amid the lions

Just notice that man would be described as being “large-brained” and the woman as “large-hearted.” Barrett switches characteristics typically assigned to specific genders during the 1800s. “Self-called George Sand” refers to Sand using a pen name rather than her real name, Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin. It is also another instance of gender reversal as “George” is a male name; George Sand decides her own gender role.

Of thy tumultuous senses, moans defiance

And answers roar for roar,

as spirits can

I would some mild miraculous thunder ran

Above the applauded circus, in appliance

Sand stands in the middle or a “circus” as lions roar at her, the “lions” being Sand‟s audience and specifically critics of female writers. Sand stands up against the lions in “defiance” but only “as spirits can”, meaning that she does so for as long as she can; how long can someone last against constant shouts of criticism?

Barrett writes an image of Sand having white wings, which may refer to Sand being able to fly above the crowd and rise as a respected author. White wings also have the connotations of purity and an angelic form.

Unlike humans bound to Earth, angels are not restricted by their gender; they are the entire equal in the eyes of God. Like “angels”, “sanctified” has biblical connotations as well. What Barrett is saying in this line is that all humans, whether male or female, should be free from society‟s “blame” and scrutiny.

13.14 Critics on To George Sand: A Desire.”

Margaret Morlier writes that “Sand was singled out [by the Victorian press] as dangerous for female readers, in particular, because of ‘impassioned rhetoric and sensual ideas’ along with a scandalous reputation.'”

13.15 POINTS TO REMEMBER:

• Barrett dedicated this poem to George Sand because she admired that Sand could accomplish so much, despite being a woman in a man‟s world. In this poem.
• Barrett examines the unfair roles given to men and women and questions their need in a world holding talent by a woman like Sand.

13.16:The Cry of the Children:A Critique

The Cry of the Children is representative not only of Barrett Browning‟s political poetry but also of her work in general. It contains themes and images that can be found throughout her work. The use of language, meter, and rhyme in the poem demonstrates her innovative poetics and singular style.

The Cry of the Children is the poet’s look at the lives of children working in mines and factories, and a moving condemnation of child labour. “Even though Barrett was a bookish, sheltered, upper middle-class unmarried woman far removed from the scenes she was describing, she gives evidence here of her passionate concern for human rights,” says the Poetry Foundation.

“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.”

The Cry Of the Children, published in 1842 talks about child labour and questions adults if they would have also preferred to be in the similar situation. It had its roots when Elizabeth heard the cries of little children who were forced to work in mines and factories.The poet talks about the religion and untimely death of the children without medication. Poem lays bare the real agony of the deprived children who could not even get a proper burial. She compares children with tender roots that require due attention and proper care. The image of dead Alice is significant as her spirit shall always be alive.

13.17: The Cry of the Children: Central Thought and Poetic Technique

It is problematic that Barrett Browning actually heard the cry of the children whom she so eloquently laments in her poem. She wrote The Cry of the Children after reading a report on the employment of children in mines and factories. A master of language, she evokes its emotional power to engender a response of outrage in her readers. The poem is intentionally didactic, political in purpose as well as subject matter. It is an expression of her own alienation and abhorrence of industrial society seen through the eyes and feelings of factory children, represented as innocence betrayed and used by political and economic interests for selfish purposes.

Throughout the poem, demonic images of a Factory Hell are contrasted with the Heaven of the English countryside, the inferno of industrialism with the bliss of a land-based society. The children are implored to leave the mine and city for the serenity of meadow and country. The grinding, droning mechanism of industrial society destroys the promise and hope of human life. Barrett Browning was concerned with the fate of a society that exploited human life for profit.

Cry of the children was praised for both its content and its unique style. Poet effectively portrays and gives a word picture of her thoughts regarding disappointment with authorities in the case of children working in the slum or factories.The poem starts with the speaker asking the children to go and indulge in playful things, but to her surprise, children indicate unwillingness. The poet ironically projects the idea of „disillusionment which occurs as a recurring motif‟ in the poem.

Summary of the poem: Thus truly it became one of the best-known of all her works. After going through the reports from the parliamentary commissioners of the terrible conditions of children’s employment in mines, trades, and manufactures, she tells of the hopeless lives of the boys and girls who are the victims of capitalist exploitation. She gives evidence here of her passionate concern for human rights. The critics reviewing Poems praised her for her intellectual power, originality, and boldness of thought; but most agreed that her weakness lay in her frequent vagueness of concept and obscurity of expression.

13.19: Excerpts from The Cry of the Children

Do ye hear the children weeping,

O my brothers, Ere the sorrow comes with years?

They look up with their pale and sunken faces,

And their looks are sad to see,

For the man’s grief abhorrent, draws and presses

Down the cheeks of infancy —

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

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

Alas, the wretched children! They are seeking Death in life, as best to have!

DID YOU KNOW:

•  In the 1830s Elizabeth’s cousin John Kenyon introduced her to prominent literary figures of the day such as William Wordsworth, Mary Russell Mitford , Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Alfred Tennyson, and Thomas Carlyle.
•  Her prolific output made her a rival to Tennyson as a candidate for poet laureate on the death of Wordsworth.
•  Living at Wimpole Street, in London, she wrote prolifically between 1841 and 1844, producing poetry, translation and prose.
•  A framed portrait of Mrs. Browning was hung in the bedroom of Emily Dickinson, who admired her for her writing and style both.

Jump to navigationList of her Poems

An Essay on Mind, with Other Poems (1826)

Miscellaneous Poems (1833)

The Seraphim and Other Poems (1838)

Poems (1844)

A Drama of Exile: and other Poems (1845)

Poems: New Edition (1850)

The Poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1850)

Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850)

Casa Guidi Windows: A Poem (1851)

Poems: Third Edition (1853)

Two Poems (1854)

Poems: Fourth Edition (1856)

Aurora Leigh (1857)

Napoleon III in Italy, and Other Poems (1860)

Poems before Congress (1860)

Last Poems (1862)

The Complete Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1900)

Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Hitherto Unpublished Poems and Stories (1914)

New Poems by Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning(1914)

Prose

“Queen Annelida and False Arcite;” “The Complaint of Annelida to False Arcite,” (1841)

A New Spirit of the Age (1844)

“The Daughters of Pandarus” from the Odyssey (1846)

The Greek Christian Poets and the English Poets (1863)

Psyche Apocalyptè: A Lyrical Drama (1876)

Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning Addressed to Richard Hengist Horne (1877)

The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1897)

The Poet’s Enchiridion (1914)

Letters to Robert Browning and Other Correspondents by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1916)

Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Letters to Her Sister, 1846-1859 (1929)

Letters from Elizabeth Barrett to B. R. Haydon (1939)

Twenty Unpublished Letters of Elizabeth Barrett to Hugh Stuart Boyd (1950)

New Letters from Mrs. Browning to Isa Blagden (1951)

The Unpublished Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mary Russell Mitford (1954)

Unpublished Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Hugh Stuart Boyd (1955)

Letters of the Brownings to George Barrett (1958)

Diary by E. B. B.: The Unpublished Diary of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1831-1832 (1969)

The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1845-1846 (1969)

Invisible Friends (1972)

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Letters to Mrs. David Ogilvy, 1849-1861 (1973)

Anthology

Prometheus Bound (1833)