Classic and Contemporary Poetry
TOWARDS DEMOCRACY: PART 4. A LANCASHIRE MILL-HAND, by EDWARD CARPENTER Poet's Biography First Line: She died at the age of sixty-three Last Line: For she lay in her chamber, dead. Subject(s): Lancashire, England | ||||||||
SHE died at the age of sixty-three, mother of a family of four children, and having during that time worked for fifty-three years in a Lancashire cotton-mill! You know the scene: the great oblong ugly factory, in five or six tiers, all windows, alive with lights on a dark winter's morning, and again with the same lights in the evening; and all day within, the thump and scream of the machinery, and the thick smell of hot oil and cotton fluff, and the crowds of drab-faced drab-dressed men and women and childrenthe mill-handsgoing to and fro or serving the machines; And, outside, the sad smoke-laden sky, and rows of dingy streets, and waste tracks where no grass grows, and tall chimneys belching dirt, and the same same outlook for miles. Here she had grown up a bright-eyed strenuous girl, to blushing maidenhood, and had become a young woman, and in time married; and here she lived, and bore her family, and died. In those daysit happens even nowwhole families, father, mother and children, would go out (locking up the house behind them) to work in the Mills; thus to earn perhaps a decent combined wage. And in this instance it was so. But the mother worked hardest of all: her one ideaher blind religionbeing work: to bring up her children to worknever to give in. During the last twenty-four years of her life she never missed a single work-morning being at the mill at 6 a.m. Even before that, on each occasion of her confinement, she would only allow herself three weeks off. When she returned to the mill she would leave the new-born babe every morning at the house of a nursing woman on the way. The youngest-bornand he it was who told it allsaid he remembered very well as a child being picked out of bed in the early dawn, wrapped in a shawl, and carried through the streets, just as he was, to the house of an old woman. Here his mother would just pop him down, and hurry on to work. At the last, after her half-century of toil, she was terribly broken with bronchitis. Often, after going out at 5.30 a.m. into the cutting winds of winter, the gas-lamps would reveal her leaning for a while, wheezing and coughing, in the shelter of a doorway to get her breath and strength. Nevertheless she never missed a single day, or even a quarter. She never gave in till the very last. Then one day at dinner-time she came home and went to bed. But at 9 p.m. the youngest son going up found her dressed!"O yes, the house wanted tidying, and she would attend to it, as she was going to work in the morning, and there was no one else to do so!" But in the morning there was someone else, and the house was tidied without her; For she lay in her chamber, dead. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...A LANCASHIRE DIALOGUE, OCCASIONED BY A PREACHER WITHOUT NOTES by JOHN BYROM FURNESS ABBEY; IN THE VALE OF NIGHTSHADE, LANCASHIRE by LETITIA ELIZABETH LANDON THE VALE OF LONSDALE, LANCASHIRE by LETITIA ELIZABETH LANDON ON STONES HOUSE, TODMORDEN, NEAR ROCHDALE, LANCASHIRE by UNKNOWN TOMB OF THOMAS MORLEY, D. 1566; STAINING, LANCASHIRE by UNKNOWN AS A MOULD FOR SOME FAIR FORM by EDWARD CARPENTER THE STUPID OLD BODY by EDWARD CARPENTER TOWARDS DEMOCRACY: AFTER LONG AGES by EDWARD CARPENTER TOWARDS DEMOCRACY: PART 1 by EDWARD CARPENTER TOWARDS DEMOCRACY: PART 2. A MILITARY BAND by EDWARD CARPENTER TOWARDS DEMOCRACY: PART 2. AMONG THE FERNS by EDWARD CARPENTER TOWARDS DEMOCRACY: PART 2. AS A WOMAN OF A MAN by EDWARD CARPENTER |
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