Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 201lover comes on a brief visit long after their love affair has ended. “I wish I’d kept that
last fond token, / And not burned your hair!” she confesses; “I wish we might go back
again, / I wish you could reclasp the chain,” she adds a little later, “I wish – you hadn’t
drank champagne, / So freely since we parted!” These are poems that actively jettison
the image of woman as the angel of the house. The speaker here is a smart, knowing,
world-weary but passionate creature, speaking in terms that anticipate Dorothy
Parker and Edna St. Vincent Millay in the next century. Domesticity is introduced here
only to be scorned, turned into an acidulous joke. “I’ll wish you all the joys of life, /”
concludes the speaker in “The Wraith of the Rose” to her former lover, “A pleasant
home – a peerless wife, / Whose wishes, Sense shall bridle!”
Lucy Larcom was one of those who contributed work to The Lowell Offering, a
journal containing the writings of textile mill operators working in Lowell,
Massachusetts. From a middle-class background, Larcom became a “Lowell mill
girl” after the death of her father. Her poems in the Offering soon attracted
attention, and she established a career as a popular poet; a collection, The Poetical
Works of Lucy Larcom, was eventually published in 1884. Larcom assumed a variety
of voices and explored a number of subjects; there are poems on such diverse
topics as the seasons (“March”), the city (“The City Lights”), young women
(“A Little Old Girl”) and old ones (“Flowers of the Fallow”). “Weaving” shows
what she could do at her best. Here, she uses a complex stanzaic form to explore
the plight of a white girl working in a textile mill. “All day she stands before
the loom, /” the poet tells us; “The flying shuttles come and go,” as she dreams of
the pastoral scenes, the “grassy fields” and “trees in bloom” from which she is
separated. “Fancy’s shuttle flieth wide”; and, as it does so, the girl takes up the song
for herself, singing of “the loom of life” on which, she speculates, “we weave / Our
separate shreds.” Eventually, the girl comes to focus on a fate, a “shred,” even more
desperate than hers: “my sisters,” as she calls them, who “toil, with foreheads black,”
further South. They picked the cotton she weaves, or, as she puts it, “water with
their blood this root / Whereof we gather bounteous fruit!” “And how much of
your wrong is mine, / Dark women slaving in the South?” she asks. Making a
passionate connection between herself and her black sisters, the mill woman also
recognizes that, by these extreme standards at least, she enjoys a condition of
relative privilege. The black women of the South suffer in ways that, according to
the “web of destiny,” can only terminate in “the hideous tapestry” of war. The
moral of the poem is underscored at its conclusion, couched as “war’s stern mes-
sage:” “ ‘Woman!’ it knelled from heart to heart, / ‘Thy sister’s keeper know thou
art!’ ” Even without that, however, the moral would be clear. “Weaving” dramatizes
the continuities and differences of oppression in a gently mellifluous, intricately
patterned but nevertheless tough way. Using the activity announced in the title –
one that Larcom knew only too well – both literally and as a figure, a symbol, it
links the fate of an individual to the general, the historical. It not only intimates, it
insists on interdependence, the fact that all – white women workers, black women,
readers – are part of one web; and it invites sympathy, certainly, but it also
contemplates, even demands, action.GGray_c02.indd 201ray_c 02 .indd 201 8 8/1/2011 7:54:43 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 43 AM