Poetry as Reform: An Appeal to Compassion

I find an immense amount of irony in the use of the term “Romanticism” in labeling an era so rife with human suffering, as evidenced by reflection upon the literature of the time.  Along with fancily frilled garments and increasingly efficient industrial technologies, The Age of Romanticism brought along a cloudy shadow to cast upon Britain’s less-favored demographics.  Women, children, and Africans all endured immoral exploitation under the pummeling fist of the patriarchy, and the nation under reign of Queen Victoria only necessitated further sufferings of sweat to fuel the fire of unrelenting industrial growth.  For the majority of the population, each day was met with constant toil and hardship, appointed them by wealthy white landlords and politicians smoking cigars and ordering ‘round guards atop ornamented towers.

But a handful of talented men and women saw the hole in the heart of the monarch.  A small army of artists put their pens to the page, punching poems and stories from typewriters, enraged by the prospect of purchasing slaves, heartbroken by the starving fates of so many of the nation’s children, discontented by the slow stifling of the hardworking English women hushed and confined to the cramp of the household.  The poets and literary artists of the time used their talents to speak for those powerless populations who were simply in no position to put forth a fight themselves.  These writers made their appeals to change by creating precise and sincere realizations of the fates of those oppressed in an attempt to elicit compassion within the hearts of the oppressors, in an effort to mitigate the growing hive of hurt and suffering.  

Slavery

Britain’s slave population was important to them for fairly obvious reasons: they meant to maintain a labor force of hardy, resilient, iron-willed workers who could help to fulfill their goal of solidifying them as the world’s leading power, a goal summarized by John Ruskin in an address at Oxford in 1870, in which he urged England to “found colonies as fast and as far as she is able, … seizing every piece of fruitful waste ground she can set her foot on, and there teaching these her colonists that their first aim is to be to advance the power of England by land and sea.” (Broadview Anthology, p. 508)

But Robert Southey and William Cowper respond to the inhumanity of slavery by speaking for the African slaves, those poor human souls oppressed to the point of voicelessness.

In Southey’s “The Sailor Who Served in the Slave Trade”, the speaker is not the oppressed but the oppressor.  Southey chooses to approach his poem from the slave-trader’s point of view because he is aware that the audience he is writing for is going to more easily and comfortably identify with a character of similar social status.  Southey hopes that the revulsion of his poem’s character at the sinful deeds he has committed will inspire the same revulsion in his readers:

The Captain made me tie her up

And flog while he stood by,

And then he curs'd me if I staid

My hand to hear her cry.

She groan'd, she shriek'd--I could not spare

For the Captain he stood by--

Dear God! that I might rest one night

From that poor woman's cry!

During a class discussion, Professor Porter presented us with this image of a medallion designed in 1787 by a potter named Josiah Wedgwood. Click here to find out more about this image’s importance in the abolitionist movement.

This image and inscription inspired social reform toward the abolition of slavery in much the same way that Southey’s poem did:  it appealed to the human being’s potential for compassion by creating an intensely human connection with the suffering character.

William Cowper’s poem “The Negro’s Complaint” makes a similar appeal, but the story is told instead from the perspective of the slave.   Throughout the poem, the African speaker makes arguments attesting to his humanity:

“Fleecy locks and black complexion

Cannot forfeit nature’s claim;

Skins may differ, but affection

Dwells in white and black the same”

Cowper, by sincerely and completely humanizing the African slave, forces the reader to consider that treating him as any other than a human is an act of extreme violence and sin, thus appealing to the universality of compassion.

Both Robert Southey and William Cowper are aware that the extreme disillusionment of the oppressive upper class is combatable by the harsh slap of reality, made possible by the eloquent precision of poetic language.

Women

Literature’s poignant appeal to compassion in the effort of reform brings us next to the issue of women’s subjugation during the populous rise of industry.  Britain’s women were victims of a prescribed gender role that harkens back much further than the time periods here discussed, but the exploitation that they suffered was perhaps as immense as ever, the victorian web(2) indicating that about one in three women were fated to work as spinners in factories such as the one shown in the included image, while those not engaged in manual labor of a similar kind were confined to a grossly limited mode of domestic life, expected to refrain from any personal indulgences.  Additionally, women were denied voting rights until 1928.

Thomas Hood’s poem “Song of the Shirt” paints a sorrowful portrait of a Victorian woman’s life as a factory laborer.  The speaker’s persistent demands of “Work--work--work … Stitch--stitch--stitch!” repeatedly drive the labor’s monotony into the reader like a knife.  Just as Cowper humanizes his character in “The Negro’s Complaint”, in order to connect the reader to the painful plight of the oppressed, Hood does so with the hard-working weaver woman:

“Oh! but to breathe the breath

Of the cowslip and primrose sweet--

With the sky above my head,

And the grass beneath my feet,

For only one short hour

To feel as I used to feel,

Before I knew the woes of want

And the walk that costs a meal”

Hood conjures the lovely image of a stroll through the natural world that excites the senses and eases the mind, creating a stark contrast between the miserable obligation of constant work and a simple but impossible wish for a woman with a fate such as hers.  Hood, aware that nature is a typical delight for a human being, forces the reader to realize the misery of a life that does not allow even this simple pleasure.  In doing so, he manipulates the more fortunate, hard-hearted audience of his poem into genuine empathy, and thus appeals to human compassion as a means of inciting social reform.

Children

Britain’s lust for industrial growth created an increasing demand for laborers. What better way to vastly expand the workforce than to exploit the labor of impoverished children!(sarcasm) In the year 1821, about half of the workforce was under 20 years old.  Factory owners could pay children much cheaper and control them easily.  (1)

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “The Cry of the Children” is a poignantly heart-wrenching reform poem that gets right to the hurt of the matter, employing a plethora of powerful human sympathies.  Browning makes her appeal in the same mode of compassion as the aforementioned poets, but speaks to the audience directly:

“Do you question the young children in the sorrow

Why their tears are falling so?”

In the fifth stanza, the speaker tells the children to go out from the city to play and sing within the meadow.  But their reply?

“Leave us quiet in the dark of the coal shadows,

From your pleasures fair and fine!

For oh, we are weary,

And we cannot run or leap”

Just as the female character in Hood’s poem, these children, driven to nothing but weariness by their ceaseless obligation toward factory work, are unable to enjoy a human pleasure as simple as playing among the grass.

“It is good when it happens, say the children,

That we die before our time.”

Browning’s appeal to human compassion borders unbearable, rendering her message of reform perfectly effective.  It seems that no amount of disillusionment caused by wealth or social status could resist the piercing reality of Britain’s suffering by poverty.

It is within this sole stanza that my argument is precisely punctuated:

“How long, O cruel nation,

Will you stand, to move the world, on a child’s heart,--

Stifle down with a mailed heel its palpitation,

And tread onward to your throne amid the mart?

Our blood splashes upward, O gold-heaper,

And your purple shows your path!

But the child’s sob in the silence curses deeper

Than the strong man in his wrath.”

What further to inspire compassion for the reform of oppressive government? How more gruesome an image?  The wealthy class, the monarch, the gold-heapers ... tread the royal path of purple toward the marketplace, sit upon a throne and drive metal heels into the hearts of children, blood splashing upon golden coins.

This, a pleading appeal to human compassion; literature as social reform; the literary artist as the one true political hero.

With the “how” of literary reform made clear, we may attempt to put the troubled mind of Thomas Hardy at ease:   

Yes, we must, as the aged thrush, throw our souls upon the growing gloom.  For always there will be the exploited, the voiceless;  always will there be gold-heapers, stomping on our beloved with metal boots.  Always will we need a poem to free them loose.

Bibliography:

1).  "Child labour." The National Archives. UK government, n.d. Web. 9 May 2013.

     <http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/citizenship/struggle_democracy/childlabour.htm>.

2).  The Annals of Labour: Autobiographies of British Working Class People, 1820-1920. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1974.  http://www.victorianweb.org/history/work/burnett2.html