Wednesday, February 6, 2013
Self Loathing in Bristol
In Robert Southey's "The Sailor Who Served in the Slave Trade," he tells the tale of a sailor who was forced by his captain to bound and flog one of the female slaves they had just picked up who ended up dying the following day. The way that he words this poem vividly paints the sailor's anguish as he describes how guilty he feels for what he was forced to do by his captain. The slave woman haunts his dreams and he seeks mercy and forgiveness from God. However, knowing what I do about God, once you ask you are forgiven, so really the issue is forgiving himself. He feels a deep anguish and self loathing for not resisting his captain's orders. If the sailor can't forgive himself then when Southey has the call to action at the end for all us to pray for him as well is all for naught. He must forgive himself if he is to recover from this tragedy.
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I think the description of the order, and the order itself are warrents that the author uses to get the audience to view slavery from the other side. When we read these, we need to remember that slavery was not seem as that horrible of a part of life. It was something that had been happening for a while, that had just woven itself into the minds and lives of the people around it. The way to break that is to get your audience to see slavery from a different view. To see what the slaves go through when no one is looking, or their living quarters or how they are emotionally effected by what they are going through makes the audience's eyes open up and see that maybe this whole slavery thing that has been going on isn't so necessary afterall.
ReplyDeleteAn important point: since God's forgiveness would have been granted through prayer, that cannot be the point of the poem. God may have forgiven the sailor, but he is not free from guilt: why? Probably because at the end of the poem he becomes Britain's social and moral consciousness. By asking the audience to pray for the sailor, Southey is forcing his audience to acknowledge the horrors of slavery and to take responsibility for it on themselves. Even if they did not do what the sailor did, they have passively allowed the trade to continue, and thus allowed such situations to exist. God and prayer are thus being used by the poet as tools to push the readers to see the horros of the trade as something they should take responsibility for.
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