Spiritual Quote of the Day (Elizabeth Barrett Browning, on Children vs. Preachers’ Examples)

“Do you hear the children weeping and disproving,
O my brothers what you preach?
For God’s possible is taught by His world’s loving,
And the children doubt of each.”—English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), on child labor, in “The Cry of the Children,” originally printed in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (August 1843)

One hundred and eighty years ago this month, British public opinion against child labor was given a powerful boost by the publication of “Cry of the Children,” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

As noted in this blog post from the British Library, her poem lifted public support for Lord Shaftesbury’s Ten Hours Bill.

In a blog post 13 years ago, I lamented the impression left by the play and movie The Barretts of Wimpole Street of a frail, agoraphobic poet. At the time of this poem, Barrett (still a couple of years away from meeting and marrying Robert Browning) was a literary figure of considerable skill and power, as demonstrated by this poem.

Barrett Browning identified herself as a Congregationalist Christian, and her religious devotion intensified rather than declined with age. But, in social justice poems like this and the abolitionist “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” (1848), she still saw human agency as the prerequisite for effecting change.

The verses above implicitly pose the issue of what and in what manner Christian ministers should preach. Should they comfort sin-burdened man—or challenge him to effect change?

Of one thing Barrett seems to approve: children will quickly sense a disparity between what a preacher says and does. In our own time, one turnoff for many Christians has been the hypocrisy of their religious community’s hierarchy in preaching Christian compassion but displaying so little of it themselves.

Quote of the Day (Poet Richard Wilbur, Translating Moliere With Verve)

“I may be pious, but I’m human too:
With your celestial charms before his eyes,
A man has not the power to be wise.
I know such words sound strangely, coming from me,         
But I’m no angel, nor was meant to be,
And if you blame my passion, you must needs        
Reproach as well the charms on which it feeds.
Your loveliness I had no sooner seen
Than you became my soul’s unrivalled queen;
If, in compassion for my soul’s distress,
You’ll stoop to comfort my unworthiness,
I’ll raise to you, in thanks for that sweet manna,
An endless hymn, an infinite hosanna.
With me, of course, there need be no anxiety,
No fear of scandal or of notoriety.”— French playwright Moliere (1622-1673), Tartuffe (1664; English translation by Richard Wilbur, 1965)

Richard Wilbur, born 100 years ago today in New York City, was as honored as a poet can get: the second poet laureate of the U.S. following Robert Penn Warren, as well as a Pulitzer and National Book Award winner. His work reflects his belief, as stated in a Paris Review interview, that “the universe is full of glorious energy, that the energy tends to take pattern and shape, and that the ultimate character of things is comely and good.”

Though it is uncharacteristic of the bulk of his work, Wilbur’s translations of Moliere, Voltaire, and Racine plays have their own unique merit, with Moliere in particular fulfilling what I usually choose in a “Quote of the Day” for the first and last days of the workweek: humor to get readers through tough hours.

I encountered Wilbur’s Tartuffe translation in a high-school anthology, and it made me eager to watch this comedy about a religious hypocrite when the Circle in the Square production was aired on public television in the 1970s. The excerpt above, I think, will give you an idea of its sprightliness, with its rhyming couplets rendering the playwright in as close an English approximation of the joy and wit of the French original as it may be possible to get.