The young lambs are bleating in the meadows ; The young birds are chirping in the nest; The young fawns are playing with the shadows; The young flowers are blowing toward the west— But the young, young children, O my brothers, They are weeping bitterly!
The deliberate refrain of "young" nature and the emphasized double "young, young children" point out the irony and tragedy of how life shouldn't be for these children. While nature frolic and play, the human children are weeping bitterly. In fact, some poems in the Victorian period use this juxtaposition of the free natural world versus the state of the oppressive poor. Thomas Hood's "Song of the Shirt" has these lines: "Oh! but to breathe the breath Of the cowslip and primrose sweet--- With the sky above my head, And the grass beneath my feet". Gerald Massey wrote in "Cry of the Unemployed": "Heaven droppeth down with manna still in many a golden shower, And feeds the leaves with fragrant breath, with silver dew, the flower; There's honeyed fruit for bee and bird, with bloom laughs out the tree". Nature is plentiful, beautiful, and free while humans suffer from hunger and fetters of their working class.