The Runaway Pilgrim Point essay :: essays research papers

In the poem, The Runaway Slave at Pilgrims oral sex by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Browning based the poem on past experience due to the fact her family had owned slaves in Jamaica for several generations. Once these slaves were set free in 1833 sixteen years 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 bend his children to marry and leave 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 speaker is a young colour slave woman who has escaped from the plantation the day before her narrative begins and has to run to Pilgrims Point where exile turned 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 America as a and of freed om). In the last part of the poem the speaker addresses the hunter sons of the original pilgrims who have perused her to stone 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 raw person, and a slave. The tone set at the beginning also 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 cast away. To further illustrate this she described the bird as little dark bird, she also describes the frogs and bombards as dark frogs and dark stream ripple Through 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 weakly with good, and no discrimination between black an d white people.In essence, Elizabeth Barrett Browning dramatic monologue proved a powerful medium for Barrett Browning. Taking her choose 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 matt-up bound by womens silence concerning their bodies and the belief that a mans private life was beyond the pale of political scrutiny (Cooper, 46).