The Golf Links

1 Pages 361 Words

Child’s Play?

In Sarah N. Cleghorn’s poem “The Golf Links” the speaker is Cleghorn. She is making an observation about the way her society works. She is showing the reader the way the young children must work in factories, while the factory owners or big business men get to play. By using phrases that invoke images Cleghorn opens the eyes of her readers and the world around her.
Even through the poem is only four lines long it is filled with images that make a huge impact on the reader. Every line of the poem summons an image in the mind of the reader. The first line “The golf links lie so near the mill” shows the reader that the golf course, or the play ground of grown men, is right next to the factories where the children work. The next line “That almost every day” allows the reader to see that every day, six or seven days a week, the children are in the factory working their days away. The third line “The laboring children can look out” brings to mind a group of little children looking out the barred window at the green golf course the men play at. They can look out, but not enjoy the clean air and the pleasures of a sunny afternoon. And the last line of the poem really makes the image of this cruelty come alive for the reader. “And see the men at play.” The grown men are outside enjoying the day and their lives as small children, who should be out enjoying their youth, are stuck in the factories making the playing men rich. But it is no sweat off the men’s back because they are not the ones up in the factories risking their lives doing the dangerous work. It is the children. Although Cleghorn’s poem only has four lines, the phrases she uses allows the reader to see the picture she wants them to see.
Through her use of phrases that form images, Cleghorn makes the reader see how wrong it is to have children doing adult work. She successfully opens the eyes of society to the wrongs of child labor....