Charlotte O'Neil's Song from Passengers by Fiona Farrell

540 Words2 Pages

Charlotte O'Neil's Song from Passengers by Fiona Farrell Fiona Farrell wrote this poem as a result of events in the nineteenth century, where thousands of women escaped to New Zealand, away from their busy hardworking jobs to start new lives. Farrell used nineteenth-century ship records to discover the name, age and occupation of Charlotte O'Neil. The ship records showed that Charlotte O'Neil was a seventeen-year-old general servant travelling on the 'Isabella Hercus' in 1871. The poem has been formed from good use of imagination so that the reader can imagine what life was like for Charlotte O'Neil. The character, O'Neil in the poem is hardworking and seems to be always busy, for example, 'I polished your parquet floor, I scraped out your grate and I washed your plate and I scrubbed till my hands were raw' this shows that Charlotte O'Neil worked at the best standard that she possibly could. However, by the end of the poem she seems to have built up confidence and she makes it clear that she is fed up of working hard, like when she says 'you can bake your bread and make your bed and answer your own front door.' She states that she is never coming back by saying 'But now you're on your own, my dear. I won't be there anymore.' I think the purpose of this purpose is to show that servants have feelings and that they are not just people that should be ordered around. The poem states that servants should stand up to their 'masters' and have a more confident attitude, for example 'and you can open your own front door,' which would be a more confident way for a servant to leave a household. The poem suggests that Charlotte is not being treated well and that her life is very different to her master's, as the poem says 'you lay on a silken pillow, I lay on an attic cot.' This compares the rich and the poor and is just a small example of how different their life-styles were.

Open Document