Blog #7: "He is not hers, although she bore him"

I chose to analyze Frances’s E. W. Harper’s The Slave Mother. I used the sound and sense element of poetry in my analysis. To me this poem does two things that made me think of it from a sound and sense standpoint. The first is that the language and word choice makes you feel like you can actually hear the cries of despair coming from the mother and child. Secondly, the poem’s use of end-rhymes creates a comparison between the second and fourth lines. This poem is not like Fredrick Douglass’s slave narrative as Harper is not describing the physical means of torture the slaves went through, but more of the psychosocial pain the mother and child went through in these separations. I believe Harper does this to fill in the gap between the reader and listener to make it more dramatic. I also think that Harper chose to give the mother moments of crying, “shrieking,” “shuddering,” and “pains” to show readers that slave women experienced the same emotions as white women. In a way I think that Harper was trying to put white and black women on the same playing field to emphasis that both have human emotions and are humans not property or un-human. The end-rhyming patterns such as “air and despair,” “pains and veins,” and “apart and heart” rhyme so that Harper could create a sense of unity between the reader and author. White women back then couldn’t relate to bearing a child that wasn’t actually theirs so Harper rhymes these words to create a connection. “He is not hers, for cruel hands/May rudely tear apart/The only wreath of household love/That binds her breaking heart” is a stanza that can be an example of this “gap” between the reader and narrator. Women could relate to having children and knew that they meant everything to their mothers and families. Harper explains that the taking and separation of children from their mothers was like taking away “the only wreath of household love.” The love of a child was the only thing most slave women cherished, but once they were taken their hearts, “[broke] in despair.” Again Harper is trying to humanize the slave mother and put on the same level as the reader to emphasis the pain and suffering she goes through in the separation her child. “he is not hers, although her blood/Is coursing through his veins.”