Elizabeth Barrett Browning's The Cry Of The Children

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In Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “The Cry of the Children,” the poem provides an ample opportunity to show the pain and suffering of the children and the corruptive nature of society in the Victorian Period. The poem was published in 1842, and held a strong political standpoint with the termination of legal child labor. The children during this time went through horrors unspeakable, working and dying in mines and factories everyday. Such tragic events gave the speaker of the poem a foundation to argue for the enforcement of moral and religious change in the hopes of ending child labor. The speaker of the poem lies distraught in the beginning with grief when she sees the hopelessness in the faces of the children forced to work in mines and factories, …show more content…
The speaker first asks in her poem, “Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers, / Ere the sorrow comes with years?” (Browning 1-2) in order to question why people had not heard the cries of the children losing their innocence earlier on, and started investigations to save them sooner. From the initial question, the poem’s speaker explains how children should have been living by using the nature of animals as examples: “The young birds are chirping in the nest,” describing the children relaxing in the safety of their home, and “The young fawns are playing with the shadows,” representing how children were supposed to be outside playing with other children and enjoying the innocence of their youth, but instead see death and suffering with no remorse (Browning 2-6). That even though these children supposedly are, “In the country of the free,” they are treated as nothing more than disposable assets to a corrupt and immoral government system (Browning ). The speaker uses the same use of examples again later in the poem to validate a loss of innocence, but now compares the children’s tears that pour down their cheeks to an unbearable sadness. A sadness that feels like the sand in an hour glass slowly dripping away at their innocence till nothing is left. Again, there is a use of …show more content…
they are seeking / Death in life, as best to have,” to represent first hand how society has driven children to the edge and now pray for an early death as an escape. Death is seen by the children as a way of relief and the only path to being released from the torture and hellish lifestyle they live everyday. The children described in the poem had tried praying to God in the hopes that he would look down upon the children’s suffering and their pain, and provide a merciful death and rescue them from the factories and mines where they were forced to work. The children of course, due to a lack of education, only knew the Lord’s Prayer when referencing God as, “Our Father” as described in line 117 by the children. These children believed if they cried and pleaded loud enough, God would “Answer, smiling down the steep world very purely, / ‘Come and rest with me, my child,’ and finally grant them the death they yearned for and sleep in his grace. This shows how the children have even been worked to the point of their faith, and have lost all hope that religion would be a means to salvation with innocence returned. Though when the “Father” did not answer their endless tears and the children watched their peers drop dead to the ground all around them one by one, they looked to God in lines 131 and 132 and are where only blinded
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