Few poems sound as cheerful as "Lorraine" while telling a story this bleak. Charles Kingsley, remembered mostly as a Victorian clergyman and the novelist behind *The Water-Babies*, writes a ballad with the bounce of a hunting song. A husband orders his wife to ride a dangerous horse in a steeplechase. She has just given birth and begs not to, and he threatens to cut off her money. She rides, nearly wins, and is killed at a brook. Under the lilting surface, the poem is about coercion: a woman with no power in her marriage is made to risk her life for her husband's pride.
The sound is the first trap. Nearly every line ends on the same "-ee" sound: Lorree, Baree, Coulterlee, me, see, be, tree. It is a single rhyme running the whole length of the poem, with no way out of it, much as Lorraine has no way out of her husband's command. The refrain "Barum, Barum, Barum" drums like hoofbeats, and the long, swinging lines gallop along with it. Notice, though, that the refrain fades. It punctuates the first two stanzas and then disappears, as if the music is drained away once the husband issues his ultimatum and the poem tightens toward its end.
The husband's language gives him away. He speaks first, and everything is "for me": "win the run for me," "win the blank for me." Lorraine is "booked" to ride, as if she were a hired jockey or an item in a programme. His threat plays on the word "keep": "It's you may keep your baby, for you'll get no keep from me." One word turns from the baby she holds to the money she depends on. Behind his sing-song ease there is a bully's logic.
Against this, Lorraine's replies are plain and human. Each of them mentions the baby: "this baby on my knee," "while a baby cries for me." Her argument about the horse builds in a simple count: "He's kill'd a boy, he's kill'd a man, and why must he kill me?" The horse's name, Vindictive, suggests malice, yet the poem makes the human cruelty the real danger. Her understatement is worse than any outburst: "That husbands could be cruel… I have known for seasons three." The word "seasons" quietly links her marriage to his sporting calendar.
The phrase "for all the world to see" is the poem's sharpest tool. The husband uses it as a boast, since he wants a public triumph. Lorraine repeats it as a dread of dying in front of a crowd. By the final stanza the narrator uses it a third time, now as a plain fact: "he kill'd her at the brook, the brute, for all the world to see." The husband's vanity has become her public death. The tree beside the brook adds a detail of its own. A pollard willow is one cut back to a stump, and it makes a quiet, ugly picture of a life lopped short.
The ending is the most carefully built part. The narrator first cheers her on ("O, the gallant lass was she!") and the line "as near as near could be" keeps her success uncertain and close. Then comes "the brute." Grammatically it points to the horse, yet after four stanzas of the husband's bullying, many readers will hear it as aimed at him too. The poem lets both readings stand, and neither man nor horse is excused. The last line, "no one but the baby cried for poor Lorraine, Lorree," shrinks her name to its smallest form. The husband is not mentioned as a mourner, and the only grief belongs to someone too young to understand it.
The poem matters because it uses a popular, catchy form to pass a harsh judgment. A reader gets carried along by the rhythm and is then caught by what the rhythm has been hiding. Judging by the text, Kingsley's sympathy lies with the powerless, and the blame falls on a man who has everything to gain and nothing to lose.