Faith

After fourteen years married to a wealthy American plantation owner, Fanny Kemble witnessed what she had once been too privileged to see: the brutal reality of slavery. This poem emerged from that crucible of disillusionment. Written by a woman who had seen her faith in humanity shattered by firsthand experience of oppression, 'Faith' argues that cynicism is not wisdom but its own kind of cowardice. The poem pulses with the tension between Kemble's hard-won knowledge and her stubborn insistence on trust anyway. It is not naive. It knows darkness. And yet it reaches toward light anyway. For readers who have had their own certainties broken, who have learned that seeing clearly can cost everything, this poem offers no easy comfort only the harder kind: the choice to remain open despite everything.