CLOSE READING!

What is it, how do I do it, and what is it NOT?

DO NOT

Evaluative• “Powerful”• “Effective• “Successful”• “Persuasive”

YOUR VOCAB: DO AND DO NOT

DO

Analytical• SPECIFIC EFFECTS!• Conceptual

consequences of formal features

WHAT IS A “FORMAL FEATURE”

Structure of address: who’s speaking? To whom? In what situation?

Prose?• Voice? (1st, 2nd, 3rd?) • Word choice, repetitions, syntax?• Subject / Verb / Object: who or what has agency?• Metaphors / Figurative language

Poetry?• Rhyme scheme, or none? (WHAT DOES RHYME DO?)• Meter / Rhythm? (WHAT DOES METER DO?)• Stanza form? • Metaphors/figurative language

BUT BEFORE YOU START…

What is actually, literally, being conveyed in the

lines / section you are analyzing? What is its explicit

purpose?

IN OTHER WORDS: what is the SENSE of the

passage?

Barrett Browning also alludes to the genre of pastoral poetry with her usage of nature imagery (“thrushes”

and “meadow-cowslips,” for example) and this extended allusion primarily occurs in the first four lines of

the excerpt. Pastoral poetry generally presents an idealistic image of country life and the language

connected with this allusion is generally cheerier than the language connected to the urban experience and

the children. Also, the commands “go out,” “speak out,” “pluck” [cowslips], and “laugh” are paired with this

pastoral imagery, which may suggest the speaker’s belief that happiness for these children may only be

achievable in a countryside setting.

Structurally, the lines I chose to analyze are part of a larger, twelve line stanza and they have alternating

pairs of end rhymes. For example, “city” rhymes with “pretty” and “do” rhymes with “through.” The meter

is trochaic as it contains trochees, or a long or stressed syllable followed by a short or unstressed one. Also,

in this particular excerpt, the line length varies anywhere from seven to twelve syllables, with longer and

shorter lines alternating. In fact there is a distinct pattern here. Starting with the first line, the length

alternates between twelve and eleven syllables. However, with the sixth and final line, the length

dramatically changes to seven syllables. This irregularity corresponds specifically with the children’s

response and the bleak image of the mine and the weeds.

Go out, children, from the mine and from the city, Sing out, children, as the little thrushes do;Pluck your handfuls of the meadow-cowslips pretty,Laugh aloud, to feel your fingers let them through! But they answer, “Are your cowslips of the meadows Like our weeds anear the mine?” (“The Cry of the Children,” Lines 66 – 72)

“They have never seen the sunshine, nor the gloryWhich is brighter than the sun.They know the grief of man, without its wisdom;They sink in man’s despair without it’s calm;Are slaves, without the liberty in Christdom,Are martyrs, by the pang without the palm:”

-Elizabeth Barrett Browning, The Cry of the Children, l.139-144

Amid the religious references, Browning includes a very potent historical one. The speaker calls the children slaves in an era where the abolition of slavery is still fresh. Slavery was abolished in the British Empire in the 1830s, and Browning writes in the 1850s. Although slavery has officially been abolished for twenty years, the children are reduced to working in a state comparable to slavery. Now the children are the slaves upon which the British Empire grows and pushes itself upward.

This idea of the children being pushed down is present within the eleventh stanza through the words “they sink” and the removal of “they” at the beginning of the last two lines. The children are described as“sinking” into “man’s despair”, a sharp deflection from the general acceptance of a rising improving Britain. The speaker makes the audience question, what is the force that pushes the children down? What is causing the children to sink? The children become associated with attributes of man, grief and despair, not through an increase in experience or a rising understanding of the world but through a downward plight that strips them of their innocence. Besides a loss of innocence, the children become stripped of any form of identity. The first three complete lines begin with “they”, a removal of individual identity into a group collectively separate from the audience. In the fifth and sixth lines, the children are stripped of even this collective identity; they simply “are”. The removal of their personified existence suggests a further level of degradation and represents another shift to the margins where the children’s cries remain unheard.

“Go out, children, from the mine and from the city,Sing out, children, as the little thrushes do;Pluck your handfuls of the meadow-cowslips pretty,Laugh aloud, to feel your fingers let them through!But they answer, “Are your cowslips of the meadowsLike our weeds anear the mine?”

In addition, the use of enjambment between the fifth and sixth lines of the passage provides a juxtaposition between the ideal and the real, an abrupt break that separates the idyllic meadow from the reality of the lives of the children. Before the fifth line enjambment, the syllabic breakdown of the six lines was 12, 11, 12, 11, 12 and the rhyme scheme was a consistent ABABA. The sixth and final line of the passage, however, interrupts this pattern and has only seven syllables and a rhyme scheme categorization of C rather than B. Clearly, the use of enjambment by Barrett Browning signals a cessation of regular rhyme and meter and symbolizes a break in the fanciful description of the world beyond the mines. The language is no longer flowery, no extra syllables are being added, and there is certainly no joyous meditating on the nature around them. All that remains is the terse, unornamented final line of the stanza and the bleak, unkempt world around the mine (62).