I Sit and Sew

From the opening line of “I Sit and Sew,” the speaker’s activism is displayed where the “useless task” (Line 1) she has been assigned is noted as perfunctory. It is safe to assume, from the opening, that the speaker is a woman, and sitting and sewing were not tasks most men were undertaking during the time this poem was published. Saying “sit and sew” (Line 1), as if sitting can be considered an activity, heightens the speaker’s claim that she’s doing almost nothing. For Dunbar-Nelson, a late Victorian woman of Creole society, the act of sitting would have been on the short list of suitable public activities for young women, giving these lines a wry and rueful tone. This speaker is doing what she can—what she is allowed to do within the confines of her life’s station. Every time the refrain “sit and sew” is repeated, the resentment in the speaker builds.

Women are banned from the horrors of war—but not from all horrors, as this speaker knows. Her anger turns from the war itself to social hypocrisy, and her frustration is as much on her own behalf as it is for the soldiers at war. Dunbar-Nelson’s mother was born enslaved and worked as a seamstress, contributing a potential layer of autobiographical resonance to the poem. The speaker recognizes dehumanization—“[…] writing grotesque things / Once men […]” (Lines 11-12); she knows this exists away from the battlefield. Other circumstances and trials have taught this speaker compassion for those warriors who “learned to hold their lives but as a breath” (Line 6).

In 1918 (the year of the poem’s publication), the Harlem Hellfighters—the all-Black 15th New York regiment—made a name for themselves fighting in support of French troops and by popularizing jazz in France, due in part of the leadership of bandleader James Reese Europe. After convalescing from battlefield injuries, Europe recorded “How Ya Gonna Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm,” a love song to Paris that hinted at the difficulties young Black soldiers would face returning to a country of Jim Crow laws and widespread lynching. Likewise, in Dunbar-Nelson’s poem, impatience and discord simmer beneath the surface. Sensing the shifting role of Black Americans, the speaker struggles to find equilibrium between compliance and awakening. In the beginning, she is boxed in by tradition, but by the end of the poem, the confines of her world are stretched to their limit.

In the third stanza, there is a turn: Once the speaker describes her own location, away from the gore and noise of battle, tucked beneath her “homely thatch” (Line 16)—a place of dreaming—her sense of righteousness demurs. “You need me, Christ!” the speaker bursts out in Line 19, and it’s not clear if the use of “Christ” is a direct address or a damnation. Two lines later, in the final line of the poem, again the speaker either calls out to God or condemns her status with a curse: “God, must I sit and sew?” (Line 21) Her “seam” is “pretty” but “futile” (Line 20); its ornamental nature is an insult to the mortal and moral imperatives of the world. The ugliness of battle, the difficult work to be done (“no roseate dream”) “beckons,” while her assigned task “stifles” (Lines 19-21), imprisoning and dehumanizing her with its lack of meaning.

Throughout the poem, Dunbar-Nelson invokes a grave tone by using antiquated diction and syntax. Archaic words like “ken” (Line 4) and “quick” (Line 18)—in its context here meaning “alive”—harken back to Middle English and Elizabethan diction, accruing authority and context for the poet. The hyphenated terms “grim-faced” and “stern-eyed” (Line 4) further echo Anglo-Saxon compound epithets. The use of inversion in Line 9, the “pageant terrible,” calls to earlier poetic styles; while not entirely out of place in 20th century works, it still marks a consciously traditional poetic voice. In this way, Dunbar-Nelson aligns herself with the voices of the past and situates the poem within a long line of poetry as social commentary. The speaker may be relegated to sewing, but the poet creates from this setting a place of wisdom, historical context, and authorial power.

Dunbar-Nelson’s complex, fragmented syntax mirrors the frustration of the speaker as well as the confusion of the battlefield in the fog of war. In the first stanza, the simple declaration “I sit and sew” contrasts the following lines about warfare, where a series of subjects and descriptive phrases never reach a verb. Instead, the speaker interrupts again with the refrain “I sit and sew” (Line 7) to end the stanza. The second stanza includes more direct statements from the speaker—“I sit and sew,” “my heart aches,” “[m]y soul […] flings” (Lines 8-11)— but as long as her thoughts stray to the imagined battlefield, verbs are absent. The sequence of subjects that never form a complete sentence creates a stalled effect; the speaker stumbles even in her passionate and vivid description, since she cannot directly witness the battle.

This speaker presumably identifies herself as one of the “lesser souls, whose eyes have not seen Death” (Line 5) and thus cannot completely understand the experience of the soldiers in the field. But the poet again may be inserting another kind of social commentary in the poem here. As a civil rights advocate, a supporter of anti-lynching legislation, and a woman of color, Dunbar-Nelson saw death. She spent much of her life working on behalf of people who “learned to hold their lives but as a breath” (Line 6). While her field of battle may not have had the formal shape of war as the poem describes, it was sometimes as brutal and as life-threatening.

The poet and the speaker dream of the fight, and neither shrinks away: “It is no roseate dream / That beckons me” (Lines 19-20). “You need me” (Line 19), the speaker affirms, and the voice of Dunbar-Nelson, the activist, is clear and confident. This poem about duty, service, and patriotism is also a poem about inclusion, asserting that every soul has value. The dreamer’s dream is no idyll; it is a vision of hard work and suffering, but with unity of purpose.