The Song of the Shirt

The title of Thomas Hood’s poem “The Song of the Shirt” is immediately at odds with the first stanza’s tone and subject matter. While the label “song” typically indicates a lighthearted or comic tone and the subject of a “shirt” indicates something lowbrow and common, Hood quickly makes clear the sophisticated and serious topic of his poem: a look at the oppressive and pitiful living and working conditions of London’s poor as viewed through the lens of the poem’s seamstress protagonist.

The poem opens with the grim image of a woman “in unwomanly rags” (Line 3), working at her home in “poverty, hunger, and dirt” (Line 6). She is overworked and “weary” (Line 1) yet still hard at work, “plying her needle and thread” (Line 4). While the seamstress is indeed singing a “song” (Line 8), her “dolorous pitch” (Line 7) makes it less a song “for the entertainment of any companions” and more of a “cry from an anguished heart” (“Thomas Hood, Early Victorian Christian Social Criticism, and the Hoodian Hero,” Robert D. Butterworth, p. 437).

The juxtaposition between the title and actual tone and subject matter of the poem persists with Hood’s choice of poetic form. “The Song of the Shirt” is written with an inconsistent rhyme scheme, but the presence of rhyming and the abundant use of repetition create a distinct and catchy rhythm that disturbingly contrasts with the poem’s content. In several of the poem’s stanzas, the seamstress repeats the phrases “Work! work! work!” (Lines 9, 17, 19, 41, 49, 51, 57, 59) and “Stitch! stitch! stitch!” (Lines 5, 29, 85), forming a steady, song-like refrain. However, while the refrain creates an engaging and catchy melody for readers, it simultaneously highlights the monotonous and all-consuming work of the seamstress. Her thoughts are so devoured with the continual need to stitch that she sews buttons onto shirts even while “asleep” (Line 23).

In the second and third stanzas, the seamstress describes the hours she works in a given day. Already at work “while the cock is crowing aloof” (Line 10), the seamstress works until “the stars shine through the roof” (Line 12). She works from morning until night, until her “brain begins to swim” (Line 18) and her body physically cannot take any more work. But like a “slave” (Line 13), the seamstress cannot stop working even for sleep. Her eyes are “heavy,” “red” (Line 2), and “dim” (Line 20) from sleep deprivation.

The seamstress urges men to think about the women who overwork themselves to repair and sew the clothing men tear and wear out (Line 27). She reminds the men that they have “sisters dear” (25) and other female relatives whom they would hate to see in her situation. She begs them to consider how they deteriorate her life along with their clothes she mends and laments that she sews with a “double thread” (Line 31) a “shroud as well as a shirt” (Line 32). In her constant stitching of men’s shirts, the seamstress metaphorically sews her own shroud or burial clothes; she is so regularly overworked that she is approaching her own premature death.

Expanding on the subject of her mortality, the seamstress personifies Death—the sole companion of her lonely labors—and refers to him with some familiarity as “that phantom of grisly bone” (Line 34). The seamstress no longer “fears [Death’s] terrible shape” (Line 35) since it “seems so like [her] own” (Line 36). She reiterates the resemblance between her and Death and observes that her many “fasts” (Line 38)—or perpetual lack of food—and over exhaustion have emaciated her body to make her look like Death himself. Figuratively sewing her own shroud, the seamstress has become intimately familiar with Death.

The seamstress returns to the woes of her profession, lamenting how the work “never flags” (Line 42) and seldom pays. Her only “wages” (Line 43) are a “crust” (Line 44) of bread, “rags” (Line 44), ruined furniture, and an empty, dingy room. Alone save for her shadow, the seamstress works every hour, “from weary chime to chime” (Line 50), like a confined prisoner sentenced to penal labor. She unthinkingly sews bands, gussets, and seams time and again until her hands are “weary” (Line 56) and her heart is “sick” (Line 55) with grief.

In addition to working all hours, the seamstress works during all seasons. She strains her eyes in the “dull December light” (Line 58) and is confined to her room in the summer when the “weather is warm and bright” (Line 60). While the swallows nesting under the “eaves” (Line 61) of her roof can fly where they please when they want, the seamstress can only long to “breathe” (Line 65) in the scent of “cowslip and primrose” (Line 66), but can never again feel the “grass beneath [her] feet” (Line 68). She can never feel as she “used to feel” (Line 70) as a child before she “knew […] the walk that costs a meal” (Line 72). As an adult, the seamstress understands that even her time is a resource she cannot waste. A short break for a walk could mean a day where she does not eat. A woman of her station has no time for a “respite” (Line 74), for “love,” or for “hope” (Line 75). Even grief, one of the few emotions she can still feel, cannot be indulged as tears would only obscure her vision and “hinder” her ability to see the “needle and thread” (Line 80). Everything—the seamstress’s life, feelings, and movements—are restrained and “collapsed into the incessant repetition of the stitch” (“Rehearsing Social Justice: Temporal Ghettos and the Poetic Way Out in ‘Goblin Market’ and ‘The Song of the Shirt,’” Jennifer Maclure, Victorian Poetry, Vol. 53, No. 2 (2015), p. 154).

The final stanza almost entirely repeats the first stanza, with the exception of one line. The seamstress has finished her song and the original narrative voice returns. As the speaker repeats the introduction of the seamstress, the wording of the initial stanza is altered: The speaker states, “And still with a voice of dolorous pitch,— / Would that its tone could reach the Rich!— / She sang this ‘Song of the Shirt!’” (Lines 87-89) The insertion of “still” in Line 87 indicates the lapse in time since the poem began; the final line shows that the seamstress returns to her song after expressing her complaints. Nothing about her situation has changed, and, like the repetitive and cyclical motions of sewing, the seamstress finds herself back where she started. Although the speaker desperately hopes the seamstress’s song will influence the opinions of the rich and elite of London, there is no indication it will. The seamstress’s pitiable story concludes with this final note of uncertainty. However, Thomas Hood did indeed achieve the speaker and seamstress’s goal: His poem was widely read and undoubtedly carried the seamstress’s “dolorous” song “to the ears […] of the rich” (“Rehearsing Social Justice: Temporal Ghettos and the Poetic Way Out in ‘Goblin Market’ and ‘The Song of the Shirt,’” Jennifer Maclure, Victorian Poetry, Vol. 53, No. 2 (2015), p. 166).