Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and William Blake both wrote poems concerning the suffering of children who were forced to do labor. The children were forced to work presumably to help their families survive in a time when everyone in the family who was able had to help support the family. Both Browning, and Blake obviously felt that the children were suffering from these circumstances, although they expressed their feelings from different perspectives and with different degrees of sympathy.
             Elizabeth Barrett Browning had an extremely dramatic view of the suffering of working children. In her poem The Cry of the Children, Browning illustrates the extreme anguish of the children, "(The children) look up with their pale and sunken faces, and their looks are sad to see..." (Abrams, 1175). Browning tells us the horridness of the problem by having the children tell us that it is, "true-it may happen that we die before our time: little Alice died last year, her grave is shapen like a snowball..."(Abrams, 1175). The tragedy is shown to us by the fact that the children, who are so young, are able to simply accept this fact. They are forced to see people their age worked to death, when perhaps they should be able to play, and fill their days with frivolity. Furthermore the children describe the grave as looking like a snowball. This shows that the children are still so young as to compare something as morbid as a grave to an object readily recognized as a childhood plaything. Browning goes on to maximize our gall at the situation by having the children in the poem tell us, "It is good when it happens, --that we die before our time," (Abrams, 1176). It is unthinkable for most to believe that a child would want to die rather than live in their forced conditions. The entire poem is filled with images of suffering, of weariness, and hopelessness. It is Browning's goal to show us how innocence was forced to...