A lot of people would not know what a Suttee is, but Lydia H. Sigourney's poem "The Suttee" reveals the practice in specific and horrific detail. The poem reflects her belief in living as a moral woman of her time, and her personal standards did not allow her to remain silent in the face of evil. .

             The opening and closing of the poem are very powerful because they are so blunt and to the point without the flowery language see in the rest of the poem. She opens with the words, "She sat upon the pile by her dead lord.", and the poem ends with the line "That burning mother's scream .". It is the story of an Indian woman who follows the practice of Suttee, or joining her husband on his funeral pyre. Sigourney does not pull her punches. She makes it clear that the people in her community approve of what she is doing and that she is not doing it out of love. Apparently she disliked her husband, because the poem says that she has been "bound . fast down to her loathsome partner." .

             But Sigourney does not allow the reader to see the Suttee as some bizarre custom followed by people who are too different from the reader to connect to. She shows the young Indian woman as a kind of "Every Woman." Even as she knows her fate, she hears her baby cry and nurses it one more time before she dies. Her baby is the one thing that might have steered her away from her fate, which was supposed to be her choice. She can't return to the crowd of people instead of dying, though, because she has been tied to the body of her dead husband. There is no choice there for her. Every mother who read Sigourney's poem would have been able to relate to it because of that mother-child image. Sigourney used poetry in a powerful way to address a terrible wrong -- the Suttee. She is also able to reveal why the practice continued: the crowd made such a noise that most could not hear the mother shrieking in pain as she was burned alive.