Poem: The Cry of the Children

Overview
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s The Cry of the Children (1843) is a public lament and moral indictment of industrial Britain’s exploitation of child labor. Speaking to a national audience she calls “O my brothers,” the poem presents the voices and faces of working children as living evidence of social sin. It contrasts the natural joy proper to childhood with the exhausted grief of boys and girls trapped in mines and factories, turning their “cry” into a chorus that demands to be heard in the streets, workshops, and halls of power. The poem moves from observation to testimony to accusation, insisting that the suffering of children reveals a nation’s spiritual failure.

Voice and Address
The poem opens with an urgent apostrophe: adults are asked whether they hear the children weeping. That question frames the whole piece. The speaker mediates and amplifies the children’s own speech, so the poem alternates between adult witness and the children’s chorus. Their repeated admissions of weariness, too tired to laugh, play, or hope, create a refrain-like pressure. The address “O my brothers” draws readers into complicity, collapsing the distance between observer and cause and turning sympathy into responsibility.

Contrasts of Nature and Industry
Browning establishes a stark contrast between the rhythms of nature and the machinery of industry. Young lambs, birds, fawns, and flowers embody growth, play, and song; by rights the children should share in that blooming. Instead they are buried in pits and rooms without sky, breathing dust, bent at the wheel, counting the clanks of iron where song should be. The steady turning of wheels and engines becomes a perverse lullaby that keeps them from rest. This imagery equates industrial time with a mechanical captivity that maims bodies and seasons alike, as if childhood itself were being mined for profit.

Loss of Childhood and Hope
The children speak as if already old. They imagine death as relief, saying it is “good” when life is over because tombs at least are quiet. They cannot imagine futures; their present drains it away. Browning emphasizes their pallor, thinness, and silence, signs of a vitality confiscated by labor. Even their tears are laborious, suggesting that grief itself requires energy they scarcely possess. The poem turns the idea of playtime into an accusation: while other children play, these must weep.

Religious Crisis
A powerful thread concerns faith distorted by suffering. When urged to pray, the children are unsure God listens; they see adults pray while tolerating injustice and infer that heaven either does not hear or is like the masters who command their toil. They cannot reconcile images of divine care with the clang of chains and wheels. Browning does not indict God but exposes social hypocrisy that makes God seem absent to the innocent. The moral is pointed: a society that breaks children’s bodies also breaks their trust in mercy.

Final Plea and Indictment
In the closing stanzas the poem’s pathos turns to prophecy. The speaker asks how long England will let engines drown out children’s cries and presses readers to look at the children’s faces as a living judgment. The image of small coffins and the echo of weeping resound as a warning: if the nation will not hear the cry in life, it will answer it in death. The poem ends not with consolation but with an imperative to stop the wheels, to restore to children the right to breathe, to rest, and to grow, making their cry the measure of national conscience.