MOTHER AND POET by ELIZABETH
BROWNING
Elizabeth
Browning writes about the sorrow that a mother feels due to the fact that
someone kills her children and she cannot do anything in order to avoid it.
The title
of the poem is a clue because readers can find out about the content of the
poem: a woman who is a mother but at the same time a poetess, that is to say,
in spite of the pain that she feels in this moment, she must be able to write
about her problem in order to fight against the injustices and the freedom.
For this,
she proposes to sing a song about the liberty.
As we can
read in her biography, she was very interested in some problems that happened
in the world, not only related to children, like in this poem, but related to
victims of all type of injustices. “Barrett's treatment of social
injustice (the slave trade in America, the oppression of the Italians by the
Austrians, the labor of children in the mines and the
mills of England, and the restrictions placed upon women) is manifested in many
of her poems” (The life)
This mother
feels impotent in the presence of the government of
When there
is no solution to the problem, she remembers when she had her children in her
arms and what she did with them, things that she taught them, above all that
people are free and have rights that anybody can prohibit them anything.
The poem is
divided in 10 stanzas. Each one has 5 verses. Its rhyme is ababb.
The poem is
written in the first person, because she is the mother who speaks. In this way,
she transmits more closeness and pain to reader, because we can feel the
suffering that any person could feel. “my
boys”(verse 3), “at me”(verse 5), “my art”(verse
7).
But she
also speaks in third person to refer to the woman that there is inside the
mother, “But this woman” (verse 8), “on her head”
(verse 9), “What art is she good” (verse 12).
She also
uses the second person to refer to her children, as if they could hear her
complaints and laments.
There are
anaphors “one of them shot” (verse 1), “one of them
shot” (verse 2), “what art…” (verse
11) “what art…”(verse 12), rhetoric
questions “ What art can a woman be good at?” (verse11),
“What’s art’s for a woman?” (verse
16). Elizabeth Browning seems to ask these questions in order to how the
readers respond to her, because she does not know the response to this.
She uses
the technique of the run-on line.
It seems that
Elizabeth Browning is telling her own history, but this is false.
She only
had one son with Robert Browning in 1849 (An overview),
and this son was not killed by Italians.
In this
page, we can see that this poem is one of the last that she wrote, because she
died in this year, 1861.
This
maternal feeling probably is the same that Elizabeth Browning felt when her
favourite brother, Edward, died in Torquay (The life).
I think
that Elizabeth Browning inspired by the death of her brother, and then, she was
able to write on the paper the pain due to the absence of a dear human being.
It is a
lyric spoken by the Italian poet and patriot Laura Savio
upon learning that both her sons have died in the cause of Italian liberty,
combining her interests in the fate of women, the role of the female poet, and
the events of the Risorgimento. This poem records the cost and the pain of the
struggle (An overview).
During
this period, under the reign of Victor Emmanuel II there was a war between
I think
that she did not understand people of that time, because people thought that
women could not be, for example, a poetess, that is to say, they could not work
outside home. For this, the poetess said, ironically, that the only art for a
woman is to maintain her children.
I think
this situation is contradictory, because on the one hand, according to
Victorian society, women could only look after her children, but on the other
hand, someone killed them, finishing with the only important thing in her life,
without taking into account the feelings of a mother, operating against the
liberty.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
- The Life of Elizabeth
Barrett Browning, http://victorianweb.org/authors/ebb/ebbio.html,
visited January 16 2006
- Elizabeth Barrett
Browning: An overview, http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/ebb/browningov.html,
visited January 17 2006
- htpp://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Emanuel_II,
visited January 17 2006