(Poem #216) The Golf Links The golf links lie so near the mill
That almost every day
The laboring children can look out
And see the men at play.
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A short but powerful poem. Recalling my comment on four-line humorous poems:
[The four line form] allows a little more buildup than a couplet, while
preserving the added impact that comes from having the punchline coincide
with the first rhyme
one can see that pretty much the same applies here, except that the
'punchline' is calculated for impact rather than humour. The topic is, of
course, indicative of Cleghorn's stance as a socialist (see the biography).
Personally, the understated commentary in the poem is just as effective as
some of the more extended rants and graphic descriptions I've seen - it
makes nice use of the dissonance the last line sets up in the reader's mind.
Biography:
Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn
née Stevenson
b. Sept. 29, 1810, Chelsea, London, Eng.
d. Nov. 12, 1865, near Alton, Hampshire English novelist, short-story
writer, and first biographer of Charlotte Brontë.
She was a daughter of a Unitarian minister. When her mother died, she
was brought up by a maternal aunt in the Cheshire village of Knutsford
in a kindly atmosphere of rural gentility that was already
old-fashioned at the time. In 1832 she married William Gaskell, a
Unitarian minister, and settled in the overcrowded, problem-ridden
industrial city of Manchester, which remained her home for the rest of
her life. Domestic life--the Gaskells had six children, of whom four
daughters lived to adulthood--and the social and charitable
obligations of a minister's wife claimed her time but not all her
thoughts. She did not begin her literary career until middle life,
when the death of her only son had intensified her sense of community
with the poor and her desire to "give utterance" to their "agony." Her
first novel, Mary Barton, reflects the temper of Manchester in the
late 1830s. It is the story of a working-class family in which the
father, John Barton, lapses into bitter class hatred during a cyclic
depression and carries out a retaliatory murder at the behest of his
trade union. Its timely appearance in the revolutionary year of 1848
brought the novel immediate success, and it won the praise of Charles
Dickens and Thomas Carlyle. Dickens invited her to contribute to his
magazine, Household Words, where her next major work, Cranford (1853),
appeared. This social history of a gentler era, which describes,
without sentimentalizing or satirizing, her girlhood village of
Knutsford and the efforts of its shabby-genteel inhabitants to keep up
appearances, has remained her most popular work.
The conflict between Mrs. Gaskell's sympathetic understanding and the
strictures of Victorian morality resulted in a mixed reception for her
next social novel, Ruth (1853). It offered an alternative to the
seduced girl's traditional progress to prostitution and an early
grave.
Among the many friends attracted by Mrs. Gaskell was Charlotte Brontë,
who died in 1855 and whose biography Charlotte's father, Patrick
Brontë, urged her to write. The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857),
written with warmhearted admiration, disposed of a mass of firsthand
material with unforced narrative skill. It is at once a work of art
and a well-documented interpretation of its subject.
Among her later works, Sylvia's Lovers (1863), dealing with the impact
of the Napoleonic Wars upon simple people, is notable. Her last and
longest work, Wives and Daughters (1864-66), concerning the
interlocking fortunes of two or three country families, is considered
by many her finest. It was left unfinished at her death.
-- EB
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