Andrew's Wiki
Cry Children

Very powerful!

Content

• What poor kids? City kids and mine working kids
  • Critique of industrialization
• Children not as well off as young animals: nature/culture; country/city
• Ironically notes that “in the country of the free” the children are suffering
• Old people and adults suffer too, but it is their time to suffer (odd!) and they have developed patience, wisdom, and peace to deal with it
• Morality, coldness, illness, undernourishment, overworked, stuffed up inside all day, not allowed to have any experience except work (no memories), no sympathy from anyone else
  • Making them disbelieve in God (clearly people must be representatives of God: she argues that we need to be better to the kids to preserve their religion; people are the workers of God and they are responsible for doing His works on the earth, responsible for others’ faith
    • Good rationale for role of Evangelical religion
  • “And they tell us, of His image is the master / Who commands us to work on”—religion only there to create obedience
  • Their speeches compare heaven with the factory by using the same imagery as that of the factory (constant turning)
• Freedom and justice, mimicking her “Cry of the Slaves” poem:
  • “Let them prove their living souls against the notion / That they live in you, or under you, O wheels!...Still, all day, the iron wheels go onward / Grinding life down from its mark”
  • Tacitly enters the “white slavery industrialism” argument
    • Then, next to last stanza, makes the explicit comparison: “Are slaves, without the liberty in Christdom” (again we see that her final arbiter here is religion, as if it would be better if only they had religion)
  • Machine becomes template for life, not the variety and love God made them for

Style

• 13 verses
• Lots of repetition: litany
  • To mimic the monotony of factory work (round and round); plus use of present participle to say the work is monotonous (sounds like description of hell)
• abab iambic pentameter = confidence
  • And a little ironic: why can’t we fix this problem yet we can
    create confident poetry?
• Peppered with question marks (accusing: why don’t you?) and exclamation points (how dare you! shocking!)

Quote: the political intervention of verse

• ”’How long,’ they say, ‘how long, O cruel nation, / Will you stand, to move the world, / on a child’s heart?” for your “throne amid the mart?”
• Finally says the child’s cry “curses” them all