Critical Commentary

I choose the poem Eliza Harris by Frances Ellen Watkins (Harper) on page 525. It summarizes the sacrifice Eliza was willing to make to for Harry. the poem describes what it must have felt like to become a criminal by just the color of your skin. It also describes the sacrifice that she was willing to make to not let the white man take her son and turn him into a slave. The stanza that really is powerful to me is"With the rapture of love and fulness of bliss, She plac'd on his brow a mother's fond kiss:- Oh poverty, danger and death she can brave, For the child of her love is no longer a slave!" (UTC Pg. 527).  She would have been willing to die so that her son could live but she couldn't die in vein by letting her son defenseless against the white man. Though she was very close to being caught and facing death she drew on the strength of her love for her child to get him to safety. It just enforces that the male white supremacy was very strong. To this day we have it. There is still more racism and judgement out there that we care to admit. Overall this poem added to my understanding of the book. Understanding just how horrible it must have been for Eliza to risk her life and that of her child and bear unimaginable pain to carry him the whole way to freedom. I would like to think it is a pain and fear that I would bear had it been me. I think Eliza shows so much courage and strength to do something so risky for her time period. 
References
 Common Place. Common-place The Interactive Journal of Early American Life, 2004.
     Web. 15 Mar. 2013. <http://www.common-place.org/vol-04/no-02/wood/>. 
 Southern Spaces. Lucinda MacKethan and Southern Spaces, 2004. Web. 15 Mar. 2013.
     <http://www.southernspaces.org/2004/
     plantation-romances-and-slave-narratives-symbiotic-genres>.
 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, and Elizabeth Ammons. Uncle Tom's Cabin: Authoritative
     Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton, 2010.
     Print.