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Literary Gazette, 21st December, 1822, Page 808
ORIGINAL POETRY.
FRAGMENTS IN RHYME.
IX. - The Female Convict.[1]
(Suggested by the interesting description in the Memoirs of John Nicol, mariner, quoted in the Review of the Literary Gazette.)
She shrank from all, and her silent mood
Made her wish only for solitude:
Her eye sought the ground, as it could not brook,
For innermost shame, on another's to look;
And the cheerings of comfort fell on her ear
Like deadliest words, that were curses to hear!—
She still was young, and she had been fair;
But weather-stains, hunger, toil and care,
That frost and fever that wear the heart,
Had made the colours of youth depart
From the sallow cheek, save over it came
The burning flush of the spirit's shame.
They were sailing over the salt sea foam,
Far from her country, far from her home;
And all she had left for her friends to keep
Was a name to hide, and a memory to weep!
And her future held forth but the felon's lot,
To live forsaken—to die forgot!
She could not weep, and she could not pray,
But she wasted and withered from day to day,
Till you might have counted each sunken vein
When her wrist was prest by the iron chain;
And sometimes I thought her large dark eye
Had the glisten of red insanity.
- ↑ This poem appears in The Improvisatrice and Other Poems (1824)
