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.
Themes
Duty, Service, and Race
“I Sit and Sew” is neither expressly patriotic nor anti-war. The speaker focuses on the suffering of the soldiers who sacrifice their physical bodies and their humanity on the battlefield. Higher ideals, nationalistic fervor, nor philosophical statements contextualize their fight; the soldiers function as part of the “panoply of war” (Line 3), the “pageant terrible” (Line 9). They were “once men” (Line 11) but now only serve as pieces of a larger system, dehumanized by pain and by their absorption into the entity that is the fight itself. The speaker sympathizes with men and still sees the individuals, “the quick ones and the slain” (Line 18), who call to her in their moment of need. This vision of the men both individualized and effaced in war resembles the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial created by Augustus Saint-Gaudens in 1897—the first war monument in the United States to honor African American soldiers. Saint-Gaudens completed individual character studies for each soldier’s face on the monument; while the shouldered weapons and shapes of the soldiers’ bodies create visual continuity and solidarity, each face represents individualized mood and personality. Like the monument, Dunbar-Nelson’s poem recognizes the erasure of the personal within war, and in order to honor the loss and suffering the soldiers endured, returns their individuality and identity to them.
The speaker of the poem twice refers to herself as inhabiting the suspended world of dreams. In Line 2, her head has become “weighed down with dreams”—the distracting, troubling visions of the soldiers at war. By the final stanza, the role of dreamer takes on a negative connotation. The speaker accuses herself and the society that condones her passive role: “Why dream I [am] here […]” (Line 16). In contrast to the men who “lie in sodden mud” (Line 17), the speaker’s location at home allows for imagination and creation in the forms of sewing and poetry.
The poet, through the speaker, poses a question: What kind of action for those left at home, in relative comfort, can be of any use to the men sacrificed to the field of battle? For Dunbar-Nelson, her efforts often focused on writing poems like this one or essays like “Negro Women and War Work,” published in 1920. Dunbar-Nelson did more, including serving on the Women’s Committee of the Council of Defense (and was the only Black woman to do so). In that role and in her writing, she advocated for the inclusion of more Black women in the war relief effort. She lamented the fact that Black nurses were excluded from serving overseas, and worried that the treatment of injured Black soldiers would suffer as a result. In that light, imagining the speaker of this poem as a Black woman left behind only to dream of her role as a caregiver, the poem has specific historical resonance.
The Writer as an Agent of Societal Change
Like many poems, “I Sit and Sew” can be seen as a statement about life as an artist. The speaker of the poem is sewing, but the poet, her “hands grown tired,” and her “head weighed down by dreams” (Line 2), labors over a different kind of line. Like colonial poet Anne Bradstreet, who used domestic metaphors to address questions of faith and societal roles, Dunbar-Nelson is intentionally coy in her apparent dismissal of a “little useless seam” (Line 15).
Dunbar-Nelson used writing as a form of activism and knew well the power of rhetoric. Her articles in journals and newspapers addressed issues of race, women’s rights, education, philosophy, politics, as well as the direct question of service and the war. This work then may raise questions about the use of a certain type of ornamental poetry, a “pretty futile seam” (Line 20), rather than prose to discuss serious societal questions. Early in her career, Dunbar-Nelson had been relegated to the category of “local color” writer—someone who created a pleasant, atmospheric impression of a place. In Dunbar-Nelson’s case, the place was the Creole world of New Orleans. Woven into the speaker’s frustration over her role as seamstress while others fight the important battles could be the voice of a writer shut off from her power, sidelined while others’ work was taken more seriously.
Domesticity as Subjugation
For multiple reasons, the depiction of women in domestic roles in Dunbar-Nelson’s work holds layers of meaning. A survivor of brutal rape and domestic abuse from Paul Laurence Dunbar, whose legacy Dunbar-Nelson never fully escaped, Dunbar-Nelson may have created a speaker who claims that, in her “homely” duties (Line 16), she has not witnessed the “pageant terrible” of the battlefield (Line 9). But the poet suffered beatings that left her unable to have children and nearly dead; she and many abused women “learned to hold their lives but as a breath” (Line 6), but in their own homes—not in a foreign war. By assigning the speaker this domestic task, Dunbar-Nelson heightens the possibility that her ability to empathize with the victims of violence on the battlefield may be greater than she admits.
Dunbar-Nelson’s mother, a seamstress, encouraged her daughter’s education to elevate her beyond the kinds of jobs domestic servants were forced to take. Dunbar-Nelson paid this forward as she helped young women learn how to perform such tasks at places like the White Rose Mission to be able to support themselves. While Dunbar-Nelson advocated for education as the means to class mobility, she often found herself caught between the practical world of immediate need and a higher ideal of the struggle for equality and respect. Of all activities, this speaker’s stitching holds Dunbar-Nelson’s own impatience at paltry tasks—the powerless feeling when movement forward is slow, if at all existent.
