Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: Poetry Literary Elements

The poem ‘’A Grain of Sand’’ is narrated from the perspective of a first person subjective narrator.

The poems are written in an iambic pentameter.

The act of seeing a loved one being sold into slavery is compared in the poem ‘’Bible Defense of Slavery’’ with the act of burying someone you love and knowing you will never see them again.

We find alliteration in the lines "But, oh! how the Rebs did hate it,—/ It was agin’ their rule’’ in the poem ‘’Learning to Read’’.

An ironic element in the poems is how the narrator praises Christianity because it brought her freedom and allowed her to know God but at the same time how it was because of Christianity that many people were made slaves. This ironic element is presented in the poem ‘’Bible Defense of Slavery’’.

The poem ‘’A Grain of Sand’’ is a meditative poem.

The setting is not mentioned in any of the poems but we can assume that the action takes place sometimes in the 18th and 19th century, when slavery was still legal and widely practiced in the United States of America.

The tone used in most of the poems is a tragic and depressing one.

In the poem ‘’Bible Defense of Poetry’’ the protagonists are the slaves and the antagonists are the slave owners who refuse the let the slaves learn how to read and be independent.

The major conflict in the poem ‘’Learning to Read’’ is between the slave masters, who do not want their property to learn how to read, and the teachers and slaves who want to better themselves through learning.

Because these are meditative poems, there is no climactic moment.

The liberation of the slaves is foreshadowed in the poem ‘’Learning to Read’’ by the building of various schools by the people who believed that slaves had the right to learn and be educated as well.

No understatement can be found in the poems.

One of the allusions made in the poems is the idea that more than often, the people sold into slavery would have been better off dead. This is alluded for example in the poem ‘’The Slave Auction’’ where the narrator describes the selling of the slaves.

The country Ethiopia is used in the poem with the same name as a general term to make reference to all the slaves taken from Africa and taken into captivity.

We find a personification in the poem "A Grain of Sand’’ in the line "Then outspake this grain of sand’’.

We find a hyperbole in the poem ‘’Bible Defense of Slavery’’ in the lines ‘’ And rocks and stones, if ye could speak, /Ye well might melt to tears!’’

We find and onomatopoeia in the poem ‘’Ethiopia’’ in the line "Her cry of agony shall reach’’.