Imagery In Elizabeth Browning's The Cry Of The Children

Elizabeth Browning’s “The Cry of the Children” utilizes contrasting dark and light imagery in order to present the struggles child laborers went through during the Victorian Era. Browning’s use of dark and light imagery is similar to her Romantic counterpart William Blake in “The Chimney Sweepers”, however, Browning’s tone is overwhelmingly exasperated, while Blake’s is childishly sarcastic. Browning’s difference in tone coupled with her use of dark and light imagery paint a vivid image condemning child labor as an inhumane and exploitative source of labor that destroys childhood innocence, in addition to crushing their religious hopes and dreams of salvation. Browning opens “The Cry of the Children” with a plea to readers stating, “Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers, / Ere the Sorrow comes with years?” and in the following stanza clarifying her question to readers stating “Do you question the young children in the sorrow / Why their tears are falling so?” (1-2, 14-15). In her opening lines, Browning communicates her negative stance towards childhood labor. She characterizes the children as sorrowful emphasizing that the children and the feeling of “sorrow” are indistinguishable from one …show more content…
Browning uses dark imagery to create an atmosphere full of despair, decay, and death, while utilizing light imagery to idealize the world around the children showing them what they should be (and could be) doing. The pleading tone in the questions she poses to readers and her pleading replies to the children are a call for recognition towards a very real problem. Through her combined use of dark and light imagery and exasperated tone of voice, Browning humanizes an issue that would otherwise be unrelatable to the general public, thereby doing an extraordinary job at addressing the issue of child labor through the medium of her