Alice Dunbar-Nelson's "I Sit and Sew"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 10 September 2024

⏱️ 10 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Nelson is likely best known for her literary output as a poet. She regularly published in Opportunity and Crisis magazines between 1917 and 1928. Her poems also appeared in James Weldon Johnson’s seminal anthology, The Book of American Negro Poetry (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1931). Nelson began to keep a personal diary in 1921. Her entries from 1926 to 1931 were later edited by scholar Gloria T. Hull for a volume entitled Give Us Each Day: The Diary of Alice Dunbar-Nelson (W. W. Norton, 1984).

Toward the end of her public career, Nelson focused on journalism and public speaking. She gave numerous speeches as the executive secretary of the American Friends Inter-Racial Peace Committee from 1928 to 1931. From 1926 to 1930, Nelson wrote newspaper columns and became an activist for women’s suffrage and civil rights. In 1922, she advocated for the passage of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, and helped establish the Industrial School for Colored Girls in Delaware. One of her speeches was published and included in Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence (The Bookery Publishing Company, 1914), and examples of her dialect poetry, dramatic prose, and oratory were collected The Dunbar Speaker and Entertainer (J. L. Nichols & Co., 1920). Both are anthologies that Nelson edited.

-bio via Academy of American Poets

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.
0:04.7	I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Tuesday, September 10th, 2024.
0:10.0	Today's poem is by Alice Dunbar Nelson, the one-time wife of Paul Lawrence Dunbar,
0:16.7	and a famed poet and journalist in her own right.
0:20.4	And the poem is called, I sit and sew.
0:24.1	I'll read it once, offer a few comments, and read it one more time.
0:27.9	Here is, I sit and sew.
0:32.7	I sit and sew, a useless task, it seems.
0:37.0	My hands grown tired, my head weighed down with dreams,
0:40.3	the panoply of war, the martial tread of men, grim-faced, stern-eyed, gazing beyond the
0:46.9	can of lesser souls whose eyes have not seen death nor learned to hold their lives but
0:52.5	as a breath. But I must sit and so. I sit and so my heart
0:59.4	aches with desire, that pageant terrible, that fiercely pouring fire on wasted fields and writhing
1:06.2	grotesque things once men. My soul in pity flings appealing cries, yearning only to go there in that
1:14.1	holocaust of hell, those fields of woe, but I must sit and sew. The little use the seam,
1:22.3	the idle patch, why dream I hear beneath my homely thatch, When there they lie in sodden mud and rain,
1:30.4	Pitifully calling me the quick ones and the slain.
1:33.9	You need me, Christ!
1:36.1	It is no rosy it seam that beckons me,
1:39.4	this pretty futile seam, it stifles me.
1:43.5	God must I sit and sew?
1:55.4	For a little bit of context, this poem was written or at least published in 1918.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Goldberry Studios, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Goldberry Studios and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.