Emanuela Kucik on Robert Southey's "Poems on the Slave Trade: VI"

Robert Southey "Poems on the Slave Trade"
Installment VI

In the sixth and final installment of his “Poems on the Slave Trade,” Robert Southey depicts the uncanny calm felt by a slave crucified by whites and left to be eaten alive. The sonnet begins with the declaration “high in the air exposed the slave is hung / To all the birds of Heaven, their living food,” thus revealing that the slave has been crucified. Since this poem follows the fifth installment of this sequence, in which the slave murders his master, we assume that crucifixion is the slave’s consequent punishment. However, although one would expect the slave to feel indignation at this punishment which is crueler even than the master he murdered, the slave does not emit a sound in protest. As Southey gives us a glimpse into the slave’s mind, we see that the condemned man realizes that he is going to Heaven to meet God. Furthermore, the slave believes that when he stands before God he will reveal the earthly atrocities of these whites who have condemned him so that they will end up much worse than him, for they will not be condemned before mere man, but condemned and damned before God.
In order to get the aforementioned message across, Southey uses the formal feature of switching perspectives in the poem, thus allowing us to truly understand what is occurring. In the first seven lines of the sonnet, the perspective is from the point of view of a third party, the point of view of an observer. This perspective allows us to see objectively what is happening. Through this perspective, we realize that a slave is being crucified and literally eaten alive; yet he is not complaining. However, in these first seven lines we do not yet know why the slave is not complaining and his calm seems entirely abnormal and even frustrating. At this point, we almost want the slave to cry out against his foes, to lash out in his own defense. However, we only see the scene from the point of view of the outsider and the outsider does not have access to the slave’s inner thoughts. Thus, Southey leaves us yearning to know why a slave who went from exacting vengeance on his master is now taking such an unjust punishment “groan[ing] not.”
However, Southey uses the last line of the octet and the entire sestet to give us a glimpse into the slave’s mind. When reading these last seven lines, I realized that they could also be seen as the opinion of the observer about why the slave is not protesting, or simply what the observer believes, or wants to believe, will happen after the slave dies. However, I read these lines as inside access to the slave’s mind. Yet, in order to do read these lines as such, I had to realize that Southey was employing yet another formal tactic for although these lines show the point of view of the slave, they are told from the perspective of a third party. I believe that writing the slave’s thoughts in the voice of what we assume is a white man reflects Southey’s intention to show that slaves did not have a voice, because the whites did not allow it. Thus, the slave’s inner thoughts can only be voiced through an apparent third party.
That said, these last seven lines show that the slave is not protesting because he knows that “beyond the grave / There is another world.” Through this shift in perspective, Southey allows us the gratification of seeing not only why the slave is not protesting, but that he believes he will be able to exact vengeance once he gets to Heaven, thus leading us to believe this as well. By ending the sonnet with the lines “that there the slave / Before the Eternal, “thunder-tongued shall plead /Against the deep damnation of your deed,” Southey makes the last line of the poem, and of the entire sequence, a condemnation of the white slave owners and the others who allowed such injustices as slavery and crucifixion to occur. Without this perspective shift, we would see the slave as so worn out that he just gives in to his own death. However, Southey uses this shift to show us that the slave was one step ahead of the whites, for he believed in a world after the world in which they reigned.