Few poems with "Rights" in the title ask for so little, or perhaps so much. Annie Louisa Walker's speakers do not demand a vote, a career or a public voice. They demand the right to stay at home, be useful and be forgotten. The opening line sets up a quarrel: "You cannot rob us of the rights we cherish." The "you" is never named, but "rob" treats these rights as property already owned. The quotation marks round "Woman's Mission" suggest a phrase borrowed from a public argument about what women are for. The women answer by taking the phrase over and painting their own picture of it, the one "our hearts portray."
Much of the poem's persuasion comes from contrast. The outside world is all noise: "harsh strife, and jarring voices," where even the adjective jars. Home is all light: a "bright picture," then "the brightness of home sunshine," gathered up to "deck our way." The speakers also anticipate the obvious objection. The third stanza insists that this is "Not in a dreamy and inane abstraction / To sleep our life away." The poem knows it can be accused of idleness and defends against it. Seclusion is presented as an active, gathering kind of life.
The hedgerow simile does most of this work. Plants that "treasure up the rain" and then "yield in odours, ere the day's declining, / The gift again" make a small economy of giving and receiving. Nothing is wasted, and nothing is shown off. You can smell a hedgerow plant without noticing it, which is exactly the kind of influence the women want: to "fill the air around us / With happiness." The phrase "ere the day's declining" also hints at evening, and so at the end of a life. That prepares for the last stanza.
The form is as modest as the argument. There are six quatrains, and only the second and fourth lines rhyme: away/portray, roof/aloof, rain/again, less/happiness, aid/laid. The first and third lines are longer, roughly eleven syllables, and end on soft, unstressed syllables ("cherish," "Mission," "seclusion"). The short lines that follow, about six syllables and then four, tuck each stanza away like a door quietly closing. In the third stanza "away" is answered by "way," a rhyme so close to repetition that it barely seems to rhyme at all, as if the poem were uneasy about drawing attention to itself. From the fourth stanza the syntax stretches into one long sentence. "As humble plants…" turns into "So let us…," then into a chain of wishes: "To live… To die." The effect is of a request that grows more intimate as it goes.
The key words shift as it goes. The poem begins in the language of law and property, with "rights," "rob" and "claim," but by the fifth stanza the women ask to be "privileged," which is a gift granted by someone else. "Unobtrusive," "unnoticed" and "humble" pile up as if smallness were the prize.
The ending is the most startling. The women wish "To die, and not a heart that does not love us / Know where we're laid." The double negative is knotty, but the likeliest meaning is that only those who love them will know their grave. Even death is kept inside "the cherished circle." Here the poem's logic reaches its extreme, asking for a life so private that it leaves almost no public trace.
That is where the poem becomes interesting. A text called "Women's Rights" ends by renouncing publicity, yet it is itself a public statement, a set of printed lines making an argument. Modern readers may find its ideal confining, and the poem leaves open whether "we" speaks freely or has been handed its lines. Still, its significance lies in how skilfully it turns the vocabulary of rights toward self-effacement. It reminds us that arguments about women's place have often been fought in the words of the opposing side. Judging by the diction and the quoted "Mission," this poem was written in the middle of such an argument.