Exploring the Inevitability of Death in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's The Cry of the Children' Poem
Dheyaa Ramadhan Alwan
Collage of Education for Humanities - Tikrit University
DOI: https://doi.org/10.25130/jls.6.4.2.10
Keywords: Victorian Age, Industrialization, Poetess, Child Labour, Death, The Cry of the Children
Abstract
The Cry of the Children is one of the significant poems written by the Victorian poetess Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In this poem, the poetess protested an industrial society that employed children as an industrial workers. She showed the social realities of the era where women and children were inferior individualities. Because of the Industrial Revolution, poverty, unemployment, diseases and death increased. What’s more the death of the children increased rapidly. The poetess through this poem expressed the situation of those children who worked in factories and mines. Thus, this paper tries to examine briefly the Victorian period in which Elizabeth Barrett Browning tried to put her poetic voice. It also focuses on her poetic career and individuality as a female poet and her place in social and public sphere. Furthermore, this paper tries to analyze the aspect of death in the poem The Cry of the Children.
