The poor land groans with its birth-pains, and brings forth scarcely a hundred pounds of cotton to the acre, where fifty years ago it yielded eight times as much.
W.E.B. Du Bois: “The poor land groans with its birth-pains, and brings forth scarcely a hundred pounds of cotton to the acre, where fifty…”
Editor's note · Context
Du Bois uses personification to describe the severe degradation of the land and its drastically reduced agricultural productivity over time.
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