Bury Me in a Free Land

Frances Harper (1825-1911)

Make me a grave where'er you will,
In a lowly plain, or a lofty hill;
Make it among earth's humblest graves,
But not in a land where men are slaves.
I could not rest if around my grave
I heard the steps of a trembling slave;
His shadow above my silent tomb
Would make it a place of fearful gloom.
I could not rest if I heard the tread
Of a coffle gang to the shambles led,
And the mother's shriek of wild despair
Rise like a curse on the trembling air.
I could not sleep if I saw the lash
Drinking her blood at each fearful gash,
And I saw her babes torn from her breast,
Like trembling doves from their parent nest.
I'd shudder and start if I heard the bay
Of bloodhounds seizing their human prey,
And I heard the captive plead in vain
As they bound afresh his galling chain.
If I saw young girls from their mother's arms
Bartered and sold for their youthful charms,
My eye would flash with a mournful flame,
My death-paled cheek grow red with shame.
I would sleep, dear friends, where bloated might
Can rob no man of his dearest right;
My rest shall be calm in any grave
Where none can call his brother a slave.
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.

Frances Harper was an African-American poet who was involved in the movement to abolish slavery. Her poem "Bury Me in a Free Land" very popular in its day evokes of the horrors of slavery.

The notion of irreversibility

"The entropy of the universe tends toward a maximum"

"Within a finite period of time past, the earth must have been, and within a finite period of time to come the earth must again be, unfit for the habitation of man ..."
　

... Rudolf Clausius  (1822-88), German physicist and mathematician, one of the central founders of Thermodynamics. In 1865 he introduced the concept of entropy.

 

I shall not care ...

... overdosed on sleeping pills.

WHEN I am dead and over me bright April
Shakes out her rain-drenched hair,
 
Tho' you should lean above me broken-hearted,
I shall not care.

I shall have peace, as leafy trees are peaceful
When rain bends down the bough,

And I shall be more silent and cold-hearted
Than you are now.



                      

... Sara Teasdale (1884-1933), American lyric poet

... the scum of mankind

... comments on the historic guilt of European colonizers

 

"Who can describe the injustice and cruelties that in the course of centuries they [the coloured peoples] have suffered at the hands of Europeans? ... If a record could be compiled of all that has happened between the white and the coloured races, it would make a book containing numbers of pages which the reader would have to turn over unread because their contents would be too horrible."

 

  

... Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965), theologian, organist, philosopher, physician, and medical missionary in Africa