The word ‘blessed’ mocks the supposed religious virtue of the Pilgrim Fathers. She has come to the edge of the American continent, faced with the sea – again, inverting the narrative of settlement and freedom in a boundless new land, to denounce the separatists: ‘And thus I thought that I would come/ /Here, in your names, to curse this land/ Ye blessed in freedom’s evermore’. The runaway slave sees only the connection between the pilgrims and an inhuman system of bondage: ‘O pilgrims, I have gasped and run/All night long from the whips of one/Who in your names works sin and woe’. In its stead, Browning presents another association, that of the intimate connection between race-based slavery and the settlement of North America. Through the voice of ‘The Runaway Slave’ Browning is directly challenging the historical association of the ‘Pilgrim Fathers’ as the origin myth for a nation founded on liberty. PILGRIMS RUN SKINI have run through the night, my skin is as dark,įrom the land of the spirits pale as dew. Of the first white pilgrim’s bended knee, The poem opens with the speaker addressing the Pilgrims directly: The speaker of the poem, an unnamed fugitive slave woman, stands at Pilgrim’s Point in an ironic inversion of the history of liberty that had become an integral part of the Mayflower narrative and American national identity. The manuscript of the poem was originally titled ‘The Black and Mad at Pilgrim’s Point’, indicating how foregrounded issues of race are to the work, but also the centrality of Plymouth Rock to the narrative. Public Domain ĭespite Browning’s anxiety ‘The Runaway Slave’ was carried by The Liberty Bell and became one of her best known poems on both sides of the Atlantic.
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