# Betrayed explained — Poetry

> Chapter companion for Poetry by Voltairine de Cleyre.

## What happens

A woman imprisoned for infanticide confronts a chaplain, recounting her betrayal by a lover who abandoned her and the social hypocrisy that condemned her while absolving him. She defends her act as a mercy killing to spare her child from starvation and a brutal world, and she prophesies a future revolution born of such injustices.

## Themes in this chapter

### Social Injustice and Revolution

The narrator condemns the hypocrisy of a society that punishes her while absolving her betrayer, and foresees a violent uprising of the oppressed.

### Faith and Doubt

The narrator's prayers go unanswered, leading her to reject a God who seems deaf and a Christ who cannot understand a woman's pain.

### Love and Loss

Her love for her child drives her to kill it to spare it suffering, and her love for her betrayer turns to bitter disillusionment.

## Character check-ins

### Unknown

The imprisoned woman speaking to the chaplain, recounting her betrayal and the murder of her child.

### Christ

Invoked by the chaplain and the narrator; she questions Christ's understanding of her suffering and his silence to her prayers.

### Mother

Mary, mother of Christ, is imagined as a figure who might pity the narrator's pain, unlike Christ himself.

## Key lines

> Christ wasn't a woman—he couldn't know the pain and endurance of it; but she, The mother who bore him, she might know, and Mary in Heaven might pity me.

Christ, being male, cannot understand a woman's suffering, but his mother Mary might feel compassion for me.

_The narrator expresses a gendered critique of divine empathy._

> Am I repentant because I saved its starving body from Famine's teeth? Because I hastened what time would do, to spare it pain and relieve its death?

Should I regret saving my child from starvation by ending its life early, sparing it further suffering?

_She justifies infanticide as an act of mercy._

> There is no avenging God on high!—we live, we struggle, and—we rot.

There is no divine justice; we simply exist, fight, and decay.

_Her faith has collapsed into nihilism._

> The time will come, aye! the time will come, when the child ye conceive in lust and shame, Quickened, will mow you like swaths of grass, with a sickle born of Steel and Flame.

A day will come when the children born of your exploitation will rise up and destroy you with violent force.

_A prophecy of revolutionary vengeance._

## Links

- HTML: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/poetry_24_se/chapters/betrayed
- Book: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/poetry_24_se
- All chapters: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/poetry_24_se/chapters