Imagery in Frances E. W. Harper's "The Slave Mother"

After reading Frances E. W. Harpers poem, “The Slave Mother,” I noticed that one of the main techniques she used in her work was very vivid imagery.  In telling the story of a child of a slave being taken from his mother, Harper employs words and phrases that evoke the intense pain and suffering of the slave mother. The continuing images of pain, suffering and terrible sadness come across very clearly in the poem. In the first stanza, we hear the screams of the mother, which “rose wildly in the air,” conveying the uncontrollable grief shown in the poem. Harper describes the mother in detail as having “hands so sadly clasped/The bowed and feeble head/The shuddering of that fragile form/That grief and dread?” By using these many descriptive adjectives, Harper paints a terribly sad portrait of a woman almost destroyed and crippled by the grief of losing her child. This image is used to generate sympathy for the mother from the readers who are shown how deep and tragic the woman’s sadness is. Harper is appealing to the readers’ emotions of pity, and possibly hoping to have readers who might be mothers themselves identify with the plight of a mother being separated from her child.