Andrew's Wiki
Cry Human

1842; its companion piece comes in 1843 “The Cry of the Children”
An anti-capitalist scourge

Content

• Prayers to God are occurring daily even if the praying person doesn’t know existence of God
  • Even though they haven’t learned from a preacher how to have the right kind of faith, they have natural faith
    • Browning’s charity and activism very rooted in God, the belief that all people have the right to God a very interesting type of republicanism
• Against exploitation (specifically capitalist, and def global: “The plague of gold strikes far and near”)
  • “We reap our brothers for the wains / And call the harvest—honor”
  • They don’t only kill the body, but also the soul: “Clay—clay and spirit—spirit”
    • Showing that that’s what she’s truly concerned about
    • “Each soul is worth so much on ‘Change, / And marked like sheep, with figures.”
      • ALSO BELIEVES THAT THE PERSON IS MADE A COMMODITY, that people are made the same as the money commodity (worth certain price)
      • On the Exchange: she aligns it w/finance capital
• She knows that wealth for someone is poverty for another: “The curse of gold upon the land / The lack of bread enforces”
• She knows that technology enforces is: “The rail-cars snort from strand to strand, / Like more of Death’s White Horses”
  • White Horses: the four horsemen of the apocalypse: Strife (conquest), war, famine, death
  • About the famine horse: Rev 6.5-6.6: the third seal (about the Corn Laws, artificial famine)
    • “And when he had opened the third seal, I heard the third beast say, Come and see. And I beheld, and lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand. And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say, A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine.”
    • This is scary b/c the careful measurement of food reflects scarcity and rationing: at that time, a penny could be 4 of wheat or 24 of barley; and 1 penny was a worker’s entire daily wage. B/c it’s scarce, you have to measure carefully
      • The oil and wine are sometimes seen as luxuries (thus a judgment on people who can afford them), at other times as religious pieties the Church shouldn’t give up
      • The implication is that the resources must be equally distributed (this is interesting: communism?)
      • Another implication: that people of the Church are now very interested, too interested, in the market and “worldly goods”
    • Also interesting to bring in the balances: here is the merchant brought in as well
• Strange image: “The poor die mute, with starving gaze / On corn-ships in the offing”
  • In the offing: near, imminent; soon
  • There’s enough resources for everyone (anti-Malthus)
  • Refers to Corn Laws: we don’t have enough bread (de facto prevention of importation of grain b/c of the tariffs and b/c of the low limit on how much grain you could import) b/c people want to make money (the farmers want to keep the prices artificially high)
• She says people deliberately ignore the people who aren’t at the feast (the “vacant seat” of the poor at the feast)
  • Mocks the finitude of human love (till death do us part: calls it “love for the deathless” which aligns with lack of care for the mortal, that is, for the exploited)
• When all you have to look forward to is Death

Style

• Fourteen verses, “abab cdcd refrain” (be pitiful, O God! like a prayer’s refrain or refrain during church service)
  • Fourteen times, Be pitiful, O God!, makes you feel desperate (mechanically induces the writer’s feeling on the reader)
• “Cloud-wheels roll and grind” – same language as “Cry of the Children”
• First person: the speaker is one of the poor; but then seems like one of the exploiters; very strange oscillation
  • Reflects her personal bio, writing against slavery but her father making money off it (they got so much poorer after abolition)
• Imagery of war, storms, animals becoming tame,