One more unfortunate,
Weary of breath,
Rashly importunate,
Gone to her death!
Take her up tenderly,
Lift her with care;
Fashioned so slenderly,
Young, and so fair!

These lines open Thomas Hood’s poem “The Bridge of Sighs,” written in the early Victorian period amid intense public anxiety about urban poverty, prostitution, and suicide. The poem was prompted by the death of a young woman who drowned herself in the Thames—an event Hood treats not as sensational crime reporting but as a moral appeal for pity. Hood, known for mixing social conscience with lyrical craft, frames the woman’s death as the end point of desperation rather than vice, urging readers and onlookers to handle her body—and by extension her story—with tenderness rather than judgment.

The stanza is a compassionate summons: the dead woman is “unfortunate” and “weary,” not wicked, and the imperative verbs (“Take her up,” “Lift her”) insist on humane care. Hood’s diction balances delicacy (“slenderly,” “young, and so fair”) with blunt finality (“Gone to her death!”), forcing readers to confront both her vulnerability and the irrevocability of her choice. The poem’s larger significance lies in its refusal to moralize; it redirects attention from scandal to suffering, implying that social conditions and abandonment can drive a person to self-destruction, and that the proper response is mercy.