victoria wheaton

Rail not at Mammon, helots of to-day,
Nor curse Bellona, goddess of the sword,
Nor Tyranny, of Toil meet overlord:
This is your covenant — “You must obey!”
Under its ban your helot-mothers lay;
Your sires, slave-born to slave-born mothers, poured
The gluttons’ wine, or cringed for bed and board:
Why murmur then? And whence your blank dismay?
Not with red rite of sword on Strife’s wan hill,
’Mid clash of arms and pomp of war’s estate,
Was Freedom slain, and her strong sons laid low,
But in some wild red dawning long ago,
When Man, the savage, took his savage mate,
And beat, and bent, and broke her to his will.

Image result for the enslavement

Marie Elizabeth Josephine Pitt was an Australian poet and socialist activist, also journalist and Unitarian. Pitt wrote very highly colored nature poetry, once much anthologized; and also wrote poetry in support of the socialist and labor movements. 

  The first part of the poem is about  how slavery was just a thing and people had to do with it without saying anything and that’s just the way life goes.  The second part is the pome about a woman speaking up and saying how is it fair that a man can just come up and take charge and  take control of our lives without us having to say about it. 

Comments

  1. AnonymousFebruary 12, 2019 at 4:02 PM

    I agree with your interpretation of the poem, but I think that the poem is also trying to explain how woman and slaves where forced to except the idea of the white mans nationalistic ideals, the poem also comparing the sense of domination that the white men have as when a parent is telling a child that "If you live under my house you follow my rules" when they say "You must obey!”
    Under its ban your helot-mothers lay". The poem is basically saying that the nation is viewed as mother figure who is trying to mold their children ( woman and slaves) into perfection.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ali Smith

Image
  To Spend the Afternoon by Eugenio Montale To spend the afternoon, absorbed and pale, beside a burning garden wall; to hear, among the stubble and the thorns, the blackbirds cackling and the rustling snakes. On the cracked earth or in the vetch to spy on co lumns of red ants now crossing, now dispersing, atop their miniature heaps. To ponder, peering through the leaves, the heaving of the scaly sea while the cicadas' wavering screech goes up from balding peaks. And walking out into the sunlight's glare to feel with melancholy wonder how all of life and its travail is in this following a wall topped with the shards of broken bottles https://www.poemhunter.com/eugenio-montale/ BIOGRAPHY: Eugenio Montale was Born in Genoa, Italy in 1896 into a family of chemical products traders. He worked as an accountant but left to pursue literature. Mostly self- taught, he found his inspiration from other writers and landscapes. In 1975, he won the Nobel Prize in L...
Read more

Efiotu Jagun

Image
A Mother in a Refugee Camp No Madonna and Child could touch Her tenderness for a son She soon would have to forget. . . . The air was heavy with odors of diarrhea, Of unwashed children with washed-out ribs And dried-up bottoms waddling in labored steps Behind blown-empty bellies. Other mothers there Had long ceased to care, but not this one: She held a ghost-smile between her teeth, And in her eyes the memory Of a mother’s pride. . . .She had bathed him And rubbed him down with bare palms. She took from their bundle of possessions A broken comb and combed The rust-colored hair left on his skull And then—humming in her eyes—began carefully to part it. In their former life this was perhaps A little daily act of no consequence Before his breakfast and school; now she did it Like putting flowers on a tiny grave. http://www.universeofpoetry.org/nigeria_p2.shtml#english3 Biography Chinua Achebe was born in 1930 to a member of the Ogid...
Read more

Henry Lilly

Image
Kim Van Kieu  What tragedies take place within each circling space of years! ‘Rich in good looks’ appears to mean poor luck and tears of woe; which may sound strange, I know, but is not really so, I swear, since Heaven everywhere seems jealous of the fair of face. The first 4 stanzas of this poem are representing the main character Kim Van Kieu, who was made out to be very beautiful except she had ''poor luck and tears of woe". Nguyen Du then explains this by saying that it was because heaven seemed jealous of her good looks. Nguyen Du wrote about morals and humanism and his own suffering which could explain his interest in this story of Kim Van Kieu. He got the story after translating it from Chinese to Vietnamese during one of his military delegation missions. In the poem Nguyen Du describes Heaven with personification by saying "Heaven everywhere seems jealous of the fair of face. Using jealous to describe heaven personifies heaven to highlight how beautiful...
Read more