The Cry of the Children

In "The Cry of the Children," she paints a wrenching picture of the plight of child laborers, alternating appeals to the reader with the children’s' own descriptions of their conditions. In responding to/explicating this, consider both the appeals and the children’s voices.

The poem is spoken by an adult, someone amongst those who might not have seen the plight of the children at first and wishes to educate about the problem. They ask “Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers,//Ere the sorrow comes with years?” These children are suffering and there is no comfort, “They are leaning their young heads against their mothers,//And that cannot stop their tears.” These children are being denied the same freedoms that other simpler creatures are permitted, “They are weeping in the playtime of the others,//In the country of the free.” The speaker is expecting to be questioned, for others to ask why the children are crying. While the speaker does respond, it is left to the children to do so as well. They are young and feel weak, they do not understand why only the old are expected to die and they are not, “‘Ask for 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.” They feel like death could almost be a blessing compared to what they’re going through working, they talk specifically about one girl, Alice who they are sure is better off dead as “merry go her moments, lulled and stilled in//The shroud by the kirk chime.” Then they feel for themselves that it’s better to die early, “‘It is good when it happens,’ say the children,// ‘That we die before our time.’” The children say when told they should go out and play in the meadows, that “‘cannot run or leap;//If we cared for meadows, it were merely//To drop down in them and sleep.’” These are children forced to work and not permitted a childhood. They don’t know the joy of running in the meadows or picking flowers because they’ve never done such things. This piece is tragic and really expresses what Barrett Browning was going for I feel. That being sorrow for these poor children and outrage that such things were ever so.