“You’ll stay too. I know. You won’t be able to go away. You’ve been here too long. You won’t ever know ‘why.’ You’ll stop asking if it does any good. And I tell you if you stop to think about it, it will kill you. You must work.”
She went to her room and I across the deserted courtyard and up to mine. But there was no sleep. It was that night that I first realized that I also must. I had seen so much I could never forget. It was something from which there was no escape. No matter how glorious the open fields, there would always be the remembered stink of the tenements in my nostrils. The vision of a sunken-cheeked, tuberculosis-ridden pauper would always rise between me and the beauty of the sunset. A crowd of hurrying ghosts—the ghosts of the slaughtered babies—would follow me everywhere, crying “Coward,” if I ran away. The slums had taken me captive.
Concerning Women
(From “Aurora Leigh”)
By Elizabeth Barrett Browning
(English poetess, 1806-1861; wife of Robert Browning, and an ardent champion of the liberties of the Italian people)
I call you hard
To general suffering. Here’s the world half blind
With intellectual light, half brutalized
With civilization, having caught the plague