I Sit and Sew

"Prologue" by Anne Bradstreet (1650)

Colonial poet Anne Bradstreet often apologized for her writing, acknowledging that her roles as wife and mother were more important. In this poem, however, Bradstreet complains about critics who say, “my hand a needle better fits” (Line 26). Like Bradstreet, Dunbar-Nelson portrays the sewing needle as an obstacle women have to overcome on the way to more important work.

"August, 1914" by Vera Brittain (1914)

This short World War I poem also portrays the dehumanizing effect of war; its visual of war’s “lurid reign” (Line 6) recalls Dunbar-Nelson’s hellish battlefield descriptions. Brittain personifies God in her poem, but rather than directly addressing him as Dunbar-Nelson does, she narrates a scenario in which God sends the war to remind men of its power, only to have people lose their faith instead. The metaphor of physical sight as a kind of understanding of death and terror also corresponds to the vision-related imagery in “I Sit and Sew.”

"Yet Do I Marvel" by Countee Cullen (1925)

Like Dunbar-Nelson’s speaker at the end of “I Sit and Sew,” Countee Cullen questions God’s judgment and action in “Yet Do I Marvel.” Dunbar-Nelson wonders why God cannot see the fitness of the poem’s speaker to serve as she is called. Cullen furthers that curiosity by listing multiple “inscrutable” (Line 8) examples of God’s ways before culminating with the most inscrutable of all: “to make a poet black, and bid him sing!” (Line 14) Beyond oddities of nature and mortality itself, the divine choice to inspire and then silence a true soul frustrates both poets.

"Sisters in Arms" by Audre Lorde (1988)

Like Dunbar-Nelson, Audre Lorde is a poet as well as an activist, educator, and visionary. “Sisters in Arms” is a descendant of a poem like “I Sit and Sew,” portraying its woman warrior who “carries each death in her eyes” (Line 44). Lorde’s chaotic battle imagery spills over into the domestic world protecting the speaker of “I Sit and Sew,” and the reader is confronted with brutality on a more intimate level than the dreamed conflict in Dunbar-Nelson’s poem. Lorde writes for a world numb to news of warfare and for eyes that, instead of never having seen death—as the eyes of the innocent in “I Sit and Sew”—have seen so much death they have forgotten how to recognize it. But the domestic is not absent, and the horror is all the more because of it: The warrior woman’s daughters-in-law are dyeing cloth as she puts aside her infant and prepares herself to go to war.