Reading Notes W6: Barbauld, Part B

Anna Laetitia Barbauld, “To a little Invisible being who is expected soon to become Visible” and “Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, a Poem” (326-330)

To a Little Invisible being:

·         Is about a child being born

·         This ties into feminists and woman, the power that woman can have.

·         Uses the child to describe that power woman could have if they stepped up and broke societal norms.

·         Example: “Germ of new life, whose power expanding slowly for many a moon their full perfection wait” (327). This is talking about a baby being born but uses it to express the situation that woman, are slowly expanding their power. Typically through breaking societal norms.

·         Example: “What powers lie folded in thy curious frame, - Senses from objects locked, and mind from thought” (327). Just like babies, women have this power they can have in the future but we just don’t know it yet. This refers to the fact that woman are just as mysterious as babies in the power that they can have.

·         The author uses child birth to express how strong woman actually are. Like if they can go through child birth, then women can do practically anything.

·         In a different way of looking at this poem, she also seems to be expressing the differences between a mother and child and the lack of knowing that stranger of a baby: “She longs to fold to her maternal breast part of herself, yet to herself unknown” (327).

Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, a Poem:

·         Addresses the unnecessarily long war and condemns societal wrongs.

·         Also addresses famine and diseases: “Man calls to Famine, nor invokes in vain, Disease and Rapine follow in her train” (328).

·         “Oft o’er the daily page some soft-one bends to learn the fate of husband, brothers, friends, or the spread map with anxious eye explores, its dotted boundaries and penciled shores, asks where the spot that wrecked her bliss is found, and learns its name but to detest the sound” (328). This addresses the wastefulness of war like how these deaths just lead to heartbreak of someone learning of a loved one’s death. She practically states that war only leads to hate and detest by those who lose those people.