"The Cry of the Children" is a poem by English writer Elizabeth Barrett Browning. It examines children's

manual labor Manual labour (in Commonwealth English, manual labor in American English) or manual work is physical work done by humans, in contrast to labour by machines and working animals. It is most literally work done with the hands (the word ''manual ...

forced upon them by their exploiters. It was published in August 1843 in ''

Blackwood's Magazine ''Blackwood's Magazine'' was a British magazine and miscellany printed between 1817 and 1980. It was founded by the publisher William Blackwood and was originally called the ''Edinburgh Monthly Magazine''. The first number appeared in April 1817 ...

''. This was shortly following the report into child labour by the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Children's Employment.

Background

Browning wrote about contemporary topics, particularly liberal causes of her day.Greenblatt, Stephen (2013) ''Elizabeth Barrett Browning'' (pp.1993-1994) For instance, in "The Cry of the Children", Browning portrays children being underground the majority of their young lives, dragging

wheelbarrow A wheelbarrow is a small hand-propelled vehicle, usually with just one wheel, designed to be pushed and guided by a single person using two handles at the rear, or by a sail to push the ancient wheelbarrow by wind. The term "wheelbarrow" is ma ...

s, and working long hours. The harsh conditions in which they are made to work can cause their lungs and hearts to rapidly dysfunction. She uses a young lamb

bleating Sheep or domestic sheep (''Ovis aries'') are domesticated, ruminant mammals typically kept as livestock. Although the term ''sheep'' can apply to other species in the genus '' Ovis'', in everyday usage it almost always refers to domesticated s ...

in the meadows to represent the young children crying from whatever pains they must endure at the moment. Browning involves young animals to symbolize innocence and being put through both mental and

physical pain Pain is a distressing feeling often caused by intense or damaging stimuli. The International Association for the Study of Pain defines pain as "an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with, or resembling that associated with, ...

for the satisfaction of an owner (1842). This encourages the reader to put themselves in that position to better understand how intense the conditions were. Although ''The Cry of the Children'' is a 13 stanza poem it does not use the popular

terza rima ''Terza rima'' (, also , ; ) is a rhyming verse form, in which the poem, or each poem-section, consists of tercets (three line stanzas) with an interlocking three-line rhyme scheme: The last word of the second line in one tercet provides the rh ...

rhyme scheme (ABA BCB CDC DED) but rather an ABAB CDCD EFEF format. This is superior as it makes the poem's main idea straightforward. This leads readers to Browning's key point, the death of children because they are forced to work from a very tender age and they pray to God to be taken before their time of actual death (Beaming Notes, 2015). Browning best describes this in lines 51-52 as the children say “It is good when it happens, that we die before our time” and in lines 86-87 the children pray for the absurd noises to come to an end (Browning, 1842).

References

Beaming Notes (2015) Barrett Browning, Elizabeth (1842). “The Cry of the Children”. {{DEFAULTSORT:Cry of the Children, The Poetry by Elizabeth Barrett Browning 1843 poems