The Runaway Pilgrim Point essay :: essays research papers

In the poem, The Runaway Slave at Pilgrims Point by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Browning ground the poem on past experience due to the fact her family had owned hard workers in Jamaica for several generations. Once these slaves were set free in 1833 sixteen geezerhood later abolitionist repudiated the unjust- power of the white slave owners. ( Stephenson, 43). With Browning rejection of her once slave owning fathers irrational authority to refuse his children to marry and founder home, this poem empowered the rage she had suppressed by years.Foremost, The Runaway Slave at Pilgrims Point is a dramatic monologue in ballad form. The vocaliser is a young black slave woman who has escaped from the plantation the day before her narrative begins and has to run to Pilgrims Point where exile saturnine to ancestors ( Cooper, 43). Browning breaks the story into three parts. The first two parts the speaker dresses to the pilgrims soul at pilgrim point, (those who first come to the Ameri ca as a and of freedom). In the last part of the poem the speaker addresses the hunter sons of the original pilgrims who have perused her to s feeling her to death (Cooper 44).Furthermore, the opening I stand sets e assertive tone in the poem. The speaker never falters in presenting the complexity of her situation, as a woman, a black person, and a slave. The tone set at the beginning in addition aid the audience to recognize that the speaker in the white mans violent system is divided by women, and black by whites. The slave employs metaphors, which Barrett use to dramatized imprisonment behind a dark skin in a world where Gods work of creating black people has been formulate away. To further illustrate this she described the bird as little dark bird, she also describes the frogs and streams as dark frogs and dark stream ripple by means of the use of her diction she convey to readers that in the natural world unlike the human one, there is no dark with bad and light with good , and no favoritism between black and white people.In essence, Elizabeth Barrett Browning dramatic monologue proved a powerful medium for Barrett Browning. Taking her need to produce a public poem about slavery to her own developing poetics, Barrett Browning include rape and infanticide into the slaves denunciation of patriarchy. She felt bound by womens silence concerning their bodies and the belief that a mans private life was beyond the pale of political scrutiny (Cooper, 46).