Frederick Douglass’s sudden death in 1895 came as a shocking loss to many of the communities fighting for equal rights for both the freed African American community and the suffragists. Dunbar, who personally knew Douglass, chose the elegiac form to remember the man who had inspired enormous change in 19th-century America, and who continued to fight for freed Black people long after the end of the Civil War. Written in iambic pentameter and standard American English, Dunbar’s choice of form signals a traditional 19th-century approach to the elegy—a notable choice when the poem itself was published among a collection of poems written in both dialect and standard English. As such, Dunbar’s elegy for Douglass demands the same reverence and seriousness afforded to white statesmen by using a revered literary formula to honor a former slave who rose to great importance.

In “Frederick Douglass,” Dunbar employs an extended metaphor of Douglass as a courageous, almost mythical warrior, cut down on the battlefield. His elegy is written for a fallen hero whose deeds will continue to inspire change long after his death. This metaphor begins in the first stanza of the poem: “A hush is over all the teeming lists” (Line 1).