Elizabeth Barrett Browning's 'A Curse For A Nation'

Elizabeth Barrett Browning is a Victorian poet that is renowned for her poetry that focuses on the social conscience of people in western culture. One of Browning’s most controversial poems is called “A Curse for a Nation,” which is a didactic poem that aims to persuade its target audience to speak out against the slave trade. This didactic poem uses ethos, logos, and pathos as forms of persuasion. The target audience for this poem is the United States because at the time that Browning wrote this poem the slave trade was abolished in England. Browning utilizes rhetorical tactics to persuade Americans to abolish the slave trade. The prologue of the poem is a unique feature that Browning uses to address the objections that the target audience might raise in regard to the creation and sentiment of her poem.
She suggests that the love she feels towards “brothers of mine across the sea” (l. 11) is the same that England feels for the United States and that this curse is not out of spite or malicious intent towards Americans in general, but out of care. Browning demonstrates that her acknowledgment of the slave trade in the United States does not mean or imply that England does not have its own issues. “What curse to another land assign, / When heavy-souled for the sins of mine?” (ll. 31-32). Essentially, Browning insinuates that looking outwards does not mean that she does not recognize the issues at home, but rather that recognizing the morality of the issues in England allows her to have the ability to recognize them in the United States. Browning has the speaker write this curse “from the summits of love” (l. 15) to make an appeal to pathos and ethos in hopes that her audience will be persuaded to take action or speak out against the practice of slavery. The prologue is composed in rhyming couplets, reinforcing the relationship between the United States and England as