Dejection by,At a time in history when female published writers were very rare, Anna Laetitia Barbauld stood out with her English Romantic style of writing poetry. She also produced a number of essays, including works on political subjects, and was a noted children’s author. She was certainly outspoken, even into her late sixties, and she fell foul of literary society when she published a poem called Eighteen Hundred and Eleven which, at the time of the Napoleonic wars, was derided as unpatriotic.
She basically saw England as a post-war ruin and she protested vehemently about the British involvement in the war. The reviews of this poem were so vicious that she decided to lay down her pen for the rest of her life.
Dejection by Anna Laetitia Barbauld
When sickness clouds the languid eye,
And seeds of sharp diseases fly
Swift through the vital frame;
Rich drugs are torn from earth and sea,
And balsam drops from every tree,
To quench the parching flame.
But oh! what opiate can assuage
The throbbing breast’s tumultuous rage,
Which mingling passions tear!
What art the wounds of grief can bind,
Or soothe the sick impatient mind
Beneath corroding care!
Not all the potent herbs that grow
On purple heath, or mountain’s brow,
Can banished peace restore;
In vain the spring of tears to dry,
For purer air or softer sky
We quit our native shore.
Friendship, the richest balm that flows,
Was meant to heal our sharpest woes,
But runs not always pure;
And Love—has sorrows of his own,
Which not an herb beneath the moon
Is found of power to cure.
Soft Pity, mild dejected maid,
With tenderest hand applies her aid
To dry the frequent tear;
But her own griefs, of finer kind,
Too deeply wound the feeling mind
With anguish more severe.
