18 pages • 36 minutes read
Alice Moore Dunbar-NelsonI Sit and Sew
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1988A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Form and Meter
The poem is made up of three seven-line stanzas, or three six-line stanzas with a refrain. Each stanza has three couplets and a repeated last line, as if a poem of septets is interrupted by the insistent repetition, which only slightly changes in the third stanza. Seven-line stanza forms are unusual; a form called “rhyme/rime royal” is the best known. Rhyme royal has a different, alternating rhyme pattern, but the same iambic pentameter lines. Dunbar-Nelson may have been harking to it as a gesture, since rhyme royal holds such a significant place in English literary history: Brought into English use by Chaucer, it was practiced by James I (hence the “royal” name). The refrain line not only has no partner, as the preceding couplets do, but is appears as a trimeter line in the first two stanzas, only emerging as a full pentameter line in the final stanza, as the speaker’s frustration finally boils over: “It stifles me—God, must I sit and sew?” (Line 21).
The rhyme pairs are significant in places: The contextual contrast of “Death/breath” in Lines 5 and 6 shows the cleverness and skill of the poet. Even more subtly deft is the opening and closing on homophone rhymes, “seems/dreams” in Lines 1 and 2, and “dream/seam” in Lines 19 and 20. The envelope structure of the rhymes echoes the hemmed in feeling of the speaker, and the shift from “seems” in Line 1 to “seam” in Line 20 underscores the wordplay in the two terms, as the speaker’s “seaming” makes her someone who must “seem” engaged and useful rather than “being” such things.
Wordplay
The poet conveys multiple messages by choosing words with flexible meanings, exploring all contexts—especially for words related to sewing, the speaker’s reluctant activity. The “seam” she sews reminds her that she only “seems” to help, far away from any chance at doing any real good. The “patch” (Line 15) she sews calls up the patch of field she describes in the previous lines, or patches on the wounds of the soldiers. Her use of “quick,” an anachronistic term for the living, also reminds the reader that often in battle the ones who are not “quick” in its more modern and common meaning are in fact the ones who end up “slain” (Line 18)
Anastrophe
Inversions of the expected syntactic order, as in a phrase like “pageant terrible” (Line 9), can be used in poetry for purposes of meter or rhyme, but it also can heighten the poetic tone or to place emphasis. In Line 16, “[w]hy dream I here” maintains forceful, emphatic spondees, where the more natural “why do I dream here” or “why dream I am here” and its unstressed syllables have entirely different moods.
Repetition
The refrain “But—I must sit and sew” in Lines 7 and 14 repeats the title of the poem, and almost entirely repeats in question form in the final line: “God, must I sit and sew?” (Line 21) There are other instances of repetition, as well, and given the brevity of the poem, these repeated words and phrases hold much weight in the overarching context of the poem. The phrase “I sit and sew” not only repeats in the refrain, but at the beginning of the first two stanzas in Lines 1 and 8. Sewing is a repetitive task by nature, so this repetition mirrors that action, but the beginning and ending of stanzas with the same line also reflects the speaker’s sense of being trapped by the task. In the final stanza, the “little useless seam” (Line 15) comes back as “pretty futile seam” (Line 20)—a near-repetition that conveys the speaker’s mood and feelings toward her task. Two lines earlier, the soldiers “pitifully” (Line 18) call to the speaker; it’s hard not to hear a repetition of that word and their call in the sounds of “pretty futile” (Line 20) two lines later.
