The poem implies that the speaker is dying soon, which lends her request a sense of urgency. The message being presented as a sort of deathbed wish also gives the request stronger moral authority.[2] The use of grave imagery to draw sympathy to the plight of enslaved people was popularized with Harriet Beecher Stowe's popular novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), whose titular character is buried in an unmarked grave.[3] Harper's poem seems to threaten that the narrator will haunt those who survive as she "could not rest" if she was buried in a land where people are enslaved.[4]
An excerpt from the poem is on a wall of the Contemplative Court, a space for reflection in the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. The excerpt reads: "I ask no monument, proud and high to arrest the gaze of the passers-by; all that my yearning spirit craves is bury me not in a land of slaves."[8]
↑Fuss, Diana. Dying Modern A Meditation on Elegy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013: 17. Шаблон:ISBN
↑Henderson, Desirée. Grief and Genre in American Literature, 1790-1870. New York: Routledge, 2016: 79. Шаблон:ISBN
↑Sandler, Matt. The Black Romantic Revolution: Abolitionist Poets at the End of Slavery. New York: Verso, 2020: 115. Шаблон:ISBN
↑Jackson, Kellie Carter. Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019: 116. Шаблон:ISBN
↑Sandler, Matt. The Black Romantic Revolution: Abolitionist Poets at the End of Slavery. New York: Verso, 2020: 113. Шаблон:ISBN
