This is a song from the “Songs of the Slaves” collection. It is a song about reunion, a longing for peace. It expresses a hope for salvation and a respite from suffering. The repetition of the phrase “I lay dis body down” indicates a resting period or state after a period of suffering or difficulty. It is a moment of peace, according to Col. James Wentworth Higginson (Phylon, 1953). There are several expressions in the song that symbolize a period of tribulation, for example in the first line (I know moon -rise, I know star-rise), third line (I walk in de moon light, I walk in de starlight), fifth line (I walk in de graveyard, I walk troo de graveyard), and the seventh line (I lie in de grave an’ stretch my arms). These expressions represent a period of collective difficulty that a group of people, the slaves perhaps have to endure. Their lives were suffering just like the depressed light characteristic of moonlight and starlight which are both far less than the perfect daylight that a normal or an ideal life would be.
And when they go to the judgment, it was still in the evening of the day, as stated in line nine. The only time day breaks and their souls meet, and suffering ends perhaps; is when they lay their bodies down. Therefore, the refrain “When I lay dis body down” might mean death. Here death is the only event that will bring peace, rest and reunion.
I’M NOBODY! WHO ARE YOU? EMILY DICKINSON
This poem by Emily Dickinson is about acceptance or unacceptance, intimacy and a fear of being discovered. Dickinson, although from a privileged upbringing, considers herself an outsider in a tightly conservative society centered around church and the family with clear-cut gender roles. Hence, “I’m Nobody…”. Dickinson appears to have found a pair in someone and told her not to tell anyone because they would be banished, in the third and fourth lines. In the last stanza, Emily Dickinson expresses her fear of being public, to be “somebody”. He compared this to a frog that screams all summer “to an admiring bog”. This perhaps refers to the reproductive behavior of frogs and toads in the wetlands during the summer months of June through august. But the “admiring bog” could also be referring to the public whose approval Dickinson no longer seeks partly because she is certain of disapproval. Dickinson appears to be comfortable in her existence as a “nobody” and in the company of fellow nobodies. She has no aspiration to be “somebody” which she views as “dreary”.
This poem, in many respects, is also a celebration of individuality-as a physical, spiritual, and intellectual being. Emily Dickinson, in this poem, has also created and addressed a conflict between the individual (a woman) and the Judeo-Christian God of her time as characteristic of her disruptive unusually long dashes; as in “How dreary ---- to be---somebody!" (American National Biography online, February 2000). It is a rejection of a society that had rejected her- a society that demanded a standardization of human thought and behavior.
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