SHE died at the age of sixty-three, mother of a family of four children, and having during that time worked for fifty-three years in a Lancashire cotton-mill! You know the scene: the great oblong ugly factory, in five or six tiers, all windows, alive with lights on a dark winter's morning, and again with the same lights in the evening; and all day within, the thump and scream of the machinery, and the thick smell of hot oil and cotton fluff, and the crowds of drab-faced drab-dressed men and women and children—the mill-hands—going to and fro or serving the machines; And, outside, the sad smoke-laden sky, and rows of dingy streets, and waste tracks where no grass grows, and tall chimneys belching dirt, and the same same outlook for miles. Here she had grown up a bright-eyed strenuous girl, to blushing maidenhood, and had become a young woman, and in time married; and here she lived, and bore her family, and died. In those days—it happens even now—whole families, father, mother and children, would go out (locking up the house behind them) to work in the Mills; thus to earn perhaps a decent combined wage. And in this instance it was so. But the mother worked hardest of all: her one idea—her blind religion—being work: to bring up her children to work—never to give in. During the last twenty-four years of her life she never missed a single work-morning being at the mill at 6 a.m. Even before that, on each occasion of her confinement, she would only allow herself three weeks off. When she returned to the mill she would leave the new-born babe every morning at the house of a nursing woman on the way. The youngest-born—and he it was who told it all—said he remembered very well as a child being picked out of bed in the early dawn, wrapped in a shawl, and carried through the streets, just as he was, to the house of an old woman. Here his mother would just pop him down, and hurry on to @3work@1. At the last, after her half-century of toil, she was terribly broken with bronchitis. Often, after going out at 5.30 a.m. into the cutting winds of winter, the gas-lamps would reveal her leaning for a while, wheezing and coughing, in the shelter of a doorway to get her breath and strength. Nevertheless she never missed a single day, or even a quarter. She never gave in till the very last. Then one day at dinner-time she came home and went to bed. But at 9 p.m. the youngest son going up found her dressed!—"O yes, the house wanted tidying, and she would attend to it, as she was going to work in the morning, and there was no one else to do so!" But in the morning there @3was@1 someone else, and the house was tidied without her; For she lay in her chamber, dead. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...TO LUCASTA, [ON] GOING TO THE WARS by RICHARD LOVELACE THE THROSTLE by ALFRED TENNYSON LUCY (2) by WILLIAM WORDSWORTH THE POWER OF MUSIC by WILLIAM WORDSWORTH DRESSING THE BRIDE (A FRAGMENT) by THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH MONICA'S LAST PRAYER by MATTHEW ARNOLD FOAM STRAY by JOSEPH AUSLANDER |