Peace at Last?

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Frances Ellen Watkins Harper paints both a disturbing image and an enlightening one as well in her poem, Bury Me in a Free Land, where she even in death opposes the tyranny of the American style of slavery. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s uses of vivid imagery bombarding all of the senses in her pleas to be buried in a land where slavery is no longer an issue and where all men and women are equally free. In the third and fourth stanzas, Harper describes in a very few words the anguish, horror, sorrow, and despair of being forced to endure the extreme agony of living under a cruel taskmaster, namely the American Slaveholder of the nineteenth century prior to the War of Northern Aggression as many Southerners viewed the war between the states of the union. Harper’s depictions and descriptions throughout the poem reach a cumulative apex in the third and fourth stanzas by forcing the reader to see through their tears the inhumane treatment of “coffle-gang” work parties and the agony of a mother as her children are torn away from her breasts (Harper 10).
The jingle, scrape, moan, and shuffle could be heard along the roadway as the “coffle-gang” made their way to the project at hand to toil in the blistering southern sun baking the tilled soil beneath their weary and worn feet (Harper 9-10). Visualization and the assault on the auditory senses tugs and strains the heart strings of the reader forcing them to see and hear what is happening to those poor black souls upon whose pain and suffering lingers until the grave. Oh to be buried in a land that is free from slavery and deprivation. Can you hear the cries of a mother who has lost her child?
Terrible heartbreak plagues the reader: “And the mother’s shrieks of wild despair / Rise ...

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...eir fellow human being howbeit their skin is of a darker shade than their own.
Harper throughout the entire poem bombards the readers’ senses and does more than tugs upon the heart strings; she plays an entire orchestra to ensnare the humanity of the reader; surely only Lucifer, himself would be immune to the plea that resounds from one stanza to the next. Slavery is horrible and cruel, find within your heart of hearts the humanity and love of your fellow man to release the oppressed and permit all to dwell in a land of the free. Mrs. Harper saw her dream come to fruition with the emancipation of the slaves and the fourteenth amendment within her lifetime.

Works Cited

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. “Bury Me In A Free Land”. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Volume A. Eds. Nina Baym and Robert S. Levine. New York: W.W. Norton, 2012. 1649-1650. Print.

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