#lucy larcom

Winter in poems ❄️

Workers at the Lowell mills demonstrated how labor politics, abolitionism, and Transcendentalism could all blend to create an oppositional activist culture. At age eleven, Lucy Larcom entered the mills, working as a “doIer,” running between the spinning frames and changing the bobbins, before eventually working her way up to become a spinner. Years later, she would remember with some disgust the dull monotony of the “buzzing and hissing and whizzing of pulleys and rollers and spindles.” Smuggling into the factory books of poetry and philosophy to entertain and educate herself, she began to write for the famous Lowell Offering and soon was following the well-worn philosophical path of reading first Locke, then Coleridge, and then finally embracing Emerson and the Transcendentalists. She would one day write a poem to Emerson— “doors hast thou opened for us, thinkers, seer!” And when the antislavery poet Whittier took her under his wing in 1843, she became committed to abolitionist politics. According to Larcom, workers at the mills understood their moral and economic entanglement with slavery. Years after she left the mill, she wrote a poem about work in the Lowell factories. A main character in it reflects on the fact that “for our daily bread, we, who must earn it, have to suffocate the cry of conscience.” When I’ve thought, Miss Willoughby, what soil the cotton-plant We weave, is rooted in, what waters it,— The blood of souls in bondage—I have felt That I was sinning against light, to stay And turn the accursed fibre into cloth For human wearing. I have hailed one name, You know it—'Garrison’—as a slave might hail His soul’s deliverer. Am not I enslaved In finishing what slavery has begun? Larcom’s poem illustrates the way some “mill girls” saw how cotton linked the oppression of the slave with their own working conditions—“enslaved in finishing what slavery has begun.”

If an apple blossom or a ripe apple could tell its own story, it would be, still more than its own, the story of the sunshine that smiled upon it, of the winds that whispered to it, of the birds that sang around it, of the storms that visited it, and of the motherly tree that held it and fed it until its petals were unfolded and its form developed.”  ~

June falls asleep upon her bier of flowers: In vain are dewdrops sprinkled over her; In vain would fond winds fan her back to life. Her hours are numbered on the floral dial; Astraea's scales have weighed her minutes out, Poised on the Zodiac; and the Northern Crown Hangs sparkling in the Zenith just at eve, To show a queen is passing. See where stands, Pausing on tiptoe, with full, flushing lips, And outstretched arms, her sister, bright July, Eager to kiss the blossoms, that will fade If her hot breath but touch them.