My Sonnet

Only this morning I saw it was gone
The thief had no mind what they had taken
But now it seemed to me that they had won
Maybe some day they too would awaken
To see the happiness that was stolen
The reason for thievery hold anon
In my watered eyes the tears sat swollen
A culprit unaware of what was done
A foolish decision was made by him
He held no regard for the world around
A decision assembled on a whim
A long buried life, far below the ground
The lesson learned a bit too late for some
But time in learning, the justice shall come

The Golf Links

The golf links lie so near the mill
       That almost every day
 The laboring children can look out
       And see the men at play.

First of all I wanted to find out what 

golf links were and when this poem may 

have been written because it seems to be 

about a very touchy subject. Maybe about 

the sociological views of a certain time. 

I was thinking the 20's and 30's, but I 

wasn't sure when golf really became a 

big thing for men to play and in the 20's

I don't think there were really that many 

men out playing golf unless they were 

extremely wealthy and the mills would 

have probably been empty since it seemed 

in the 20's that no jobs were available. 

I wasn't too sure about the time when the 

child labor movement really came about, 

but I didn't think it went as late as the 

30's and I know it never got past the 40's. 

When I finally found a date it said it was 

written in 1915 which surprised me a bit, 

but in those times child labor was a very 

important movement at that time. Golf 

links are courses built on sandy ground 

perhaps near a shore. It's almost like 

these rich men are out having a day at 

the beach while mere children labor 

away in a mill. I feel like it's the 

owners of the mill that the children are 

watching. Maybe it represents the moral 

repugnance of the time. These men see no 

problem with the fact that children are 

working in dangerous situations and they 

even go so far as to shove the children's 

faces in it by playing out near the mill. 

I thought this poem did a very good job of 

getting straight to the authors point about 

how wrong child labor is. It is very 

interesting because normally it is laboring 

men and children at play but now the roles 

have been reversed and I think that the 

author makes that a shocking reality for 

the reader. When the author says they 

" can look out/And see the men at play" 

it was almost as if they were privileged 

enough to even get to look at the men playing. 

Overall I thought it was a very powerful and 

interesting poem. The author had a very 

obvious standpoint and she makes it very 

clear and personal about how child labor 

made her feel.