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Read the poem at http://oldpoetry.com/opoem/102 85-Elizabeth-Barrett-Browning- A-Year-s-Spinning .

"A Year's Spinning," by Elizabeth Barrett Browning is told in the voice of a sad, bitter woman, who was jilted by a false lover, abandoned by a baby that died at birth, and rejected by her mother, who cursed her. In seven short, but regret-filled verses we learn the true meaning of the old-fashioned term "spinster," which used to be listed as the professional occupation of an older, unmarried woman with no good prospects for marriage. (Spinsters worked at home spinning cloth from yarn as a way to earn their keep.) Each verse ends with the speaker's rather gloomy chant that her "spinning is all done."

Before the spinning is done, though, our spinster lady encounters the unnamed "he," who "through the door. . . brought the sun." Here we get a dramatic contrast to her life as she listed to her spinning wheel "go on, and on." Alas, though, his false oaths "That love ne'er ended, once begun" were "truth for only one" (our spinster, who truly wanted to believe - "I smiled. . . believing for us both."

Our spinster's mother, though, was a realist (if not a killjoy), and the mother offered no comfort to the abandoned spinster other than "My mother cursed me. . ." Mother's curses, however, were nothing compared to the "silence that made me groan" as her out-of-wedlock child, born dead, made no noise. Poor woman. She was cursed by her mother on her mother's death-bed and was even denied the blessing of at least a living child.

Just when it seems the poem cannot get any sadder, the last two verses dwell on the theme of death, gravestones, and a poignant allusion to the spinner's wheel. She begins verse 5 with "Bury me twixt my mother's grave" and her dead baby's, because "my spinning is all done." In verse 6 she knows that her gravestone will be "upon my heart and head" (a figurative representation of grief), "But no name written on the stone!" She only wants her neighbors to "whisper low instead" that she "This sinner was a loving one - -/And now her spinning is all done." At least she was a loving person. Sadly, though, sometimes love is repaid with lies, recrimination, and the grief of loss.

She saves her final word for the cad who got her pregnant and left her: Leave the door to her home open, she says, "In case he should pass by anon." Let this creep see her spinster's wheel, "That HE, when passing in the sun,/May see the spinning is all done." Ah, men. They get to walk in the sun, sow their wild oats, and cosequences be damned.

So her year's spinning was really her short romance, loss of her unfaithful lover and disapproving mother, and death of her child. More than anything, though, the poem is an allegorical ballad of the general plight of women in past generations who were totally dependent on the male-dominated institution of marriage so that they (the women) could avoid spinsterhood.

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