In the poem “Blackberries” by Ysef Komunyakaa, the author depicts a young boy picking blackberries in the woods. Throughout the poem the author causes the reader to believe the young boy is guilty, yet the reader is not completely sure why there is an intense feeling of guilt. After having knowledge of the authors race, the feeling of guilt makes complete sense. The author is a black man who grew up in rural Louisiana, having that knowledge the tone of the story is even more logical. Since the author is a African American male who grew up in rural Louisiana, it would only make sense he was writing about his own childhood experiences, or feelings he once felt impacted his life. In the poem “Blackberries” the author causes the audience to feel …show more content…
Since the character is so young, it is obvious he does not fully understand why he is faced with discrimination based on merely the color of his skin. The child does not even mention the color of his skin, because to him it is irrelevant and should have nothing to do with how he is treated. With a young child being so innocent they cannot understand why the color of his or her skin would put them back in life, although they may know it does, he or she is only faced with feelings of confusion. By directly leaving the cultural context of the child's race out of the poem, the reader feels that he is extremely innocent and therefore does not deserve his battle of racism. By also including symbols and context clues of Jesus Christ the author builds the unfair racial treatment of the character. The author states that, “They fell among a garland of thorns,” which causes the reader to think of Jesus. Some readers may also think that the point of the berries is to resemble the Garden of Eden. Making the reader compare the child to Jesus not only makes the reader feel like he did not deserve his treatment, but also causes the reader to be emotional. Intense feelings of emotion leads the reader to not only feel terrible because of the characters racial setback, but also causes the reader to relate deeply to the character by including the most important part of anyone’s life, religion.
The first two lines of the poem set the mood of fear and gloom which is constant throughout the remainder of the poem. The word choice of "black" to describe the speaker's face can convey several messages (502). The most obvious meaning ...
This made the author dislike and have hatred towards the parents of his fellow classmates for instilling the white supremacy attitude and mind-set that they had. It wasn’t possible they felt this way on their own because honestly growing up children don’t see color they just see other kids to play with. So this must have meant that the parents were teaching their children that they were better and above others because there skin was
The society of today’s world revolves around satisfaction, and as humans there is never a true feeling of satisfaction. In our lives it is no longer about satisfying ourselves but also satisfying the people we love the most. Throughout the poems; Blackberries by Yusef Komunyakaa, Singapore by Mary Oliver, and What Work Is by Philip Levine, lays a constant crave of satisfaction. The real issue is knowing that our soul-hunger for satisfaction is never truly met, at least from other people’s eyes. In each poem there comes a circumstance of when the narrator faces a time when questioning their whole idea of self-worth and satisfaction, caused by outside influences. These outside influences usually pity the narrator for having the jobs that they
For example, when Hope, Dell, and Jackie go with their grandpa to The Candy Lady’s house, “...the sound of melting ice cream being slurped up fast, before it slides past our wrists, on down our arms and onto the hot, dry road” (Woodson 71). Furthermore, symbolism plays a big part in the poems. At one point in the story, once the family is in New York, the narrator describes a single tree in a small square of dirt, and it represents the part of the south that she still holds with her, the fact that Greenville, South Carolina will always be a part of her. I appreciated the symbolism and the fact that it provided more depth to the book; some instances of symbolism were genuinely
In this passage, The Flowers by Alice Walker employs several literary devices that serve as elements that correspond with the innocence of a child and her adventure to peripeteia that builds into an impactful allegorical short story. With the intricate style of the writer and through the uses of diction, tone, imagery, and symbolism; Alice accentuates her symbolic definition of the term "the flowers" and adequately prepares readers for a horrid conclusion of the novel.
The fact that they feel they can sit about the knee of their mother, in this stereotypical image of a happy family doesn’t suggest that the children in this poem are oppressed... ... middle of paper ... ... y has a negative view of the childish desire for play which clearly has an effect on the children. The fact that they the are whispering shows that they are afraid of the nurse, and that they cannot express their true thoughts and desires freely, which is why they whisper, and therefore shows that Blake feels that children are oppressed. I feel that the two poems from innocence which are ‘The Echoing Green,’ and ‘The Nurses Song,’ display Blake’s ideological view of country life which I referred to in my introduction, and show his desire for childhood to be enjoyed.
The teacher is giving them a lecture on slavery. He says that “Before the war they were happy.” (Citation 2) I don’t think anyone would be happy to be owned by somebody. Natasha Trethewey writes in the poem that she learned a false representation of slavery growing up. Her teacher quotes the textbook as saying that the slaves were not in peril of any sort because they were fed and clothed and housed, almost as if this justifies the way they were treated. Natasha says that, “These were lies my teacher guarded.” (Citation 3 )The difference between these is how they both learned about their history. The tone of “Incident” is infuriating, because he was only a child. Who would disrespect a child. This isn’t how a child should find out about who they are as a person. The word, “Nigger” doesn’t define you. The tone of Southern History, is also infuriating. Why lie about the history of a tragic time period. Is it to make you feel better? We live in a period of time where we are very self-aware of what goes on to our community, and we have begun to not let it slide. We have begun to make the changes that can possibly save us in the
At the beginning of the poem, the impression of passion and violence are evoked through the staccato shouting of the speakers. The son-father conflict immediately surfaces: “I am your son, white man!” to which the father’s rejection is prompt: “You are my son! / Like hell!”. This answer implies the father’s direct accusation of the inherent inferiority of his mulatto son. The father goes on insulting both the “bastard son” and his mother whose bodies are nothing to him but a “toy” in a “nigger night”. Moreover, phrases such as “Juicy bodies”, “Of nigger wenches”, “Black blue”, and “Against black fences” suggest that the relationship between the white father and the black mother is devoid of any emot...
To focus deeper on imagery it paints a very dark thought at first about how a father physically abuses his kid in front of the mom. This shows how good the author is at writing and how he ties in the theme to the poem. A line that is so misinterpreted is, “At every step you missed, my right ear scraped a
Throughout the poem the speaker talks about light and dark. The references to light and dark act as a continuous metaphor. Light refers to, not just the speaker, but white people in general and the comparable ease of their lives in oppose to the lives of their black counterparts. Dark, of course, represents black people. The speaker says, “without meaning or / trying to I must profit from his darkness.” Furthermore the speaker thinks about how the boy is like black cotton absorbing the heat of the nation’s less than kind attitude towards black men. She, meaning the speaker, has lead a far different life. She states, “There is / no way to know how easy this / white skin makes my life.” Light symbolizes goodness and the ease of her life to the dark of the man’s life.
In third stanza Trethewey cries, “At the cross trussed like a Christmas tree” (9). Trethewey tries to give us reader an important visual image of a cross burning that she saw as a little child from a window by comparing with Christmas tree to understand the situation of her back in time. In addition, she also cries, “a few man gathered, white as angels in their gowns” (10). This implies the innocent view of Trethewey as a child. The white men in gown refers to those member of the Ku Klux Klan, who were standing in her front lawn wearing their customary white outfit. Little girl assumes that those men in white are sent by God, therefore, she links them with an angel. This stanza shows a faith and hope for little girl with new understanding of world who born in mixed race family and living in racist area, such a Mississippi during that time and suffering with a lifestyle because she was mixed. This has an impact on all her poems that comes from Native Guard. As Trethewey says, “I think I always understood myself as somehow a part of history. My understanding had to do with my very existence” (qtd. in
“Strange Fruit,” written by Abel Meeropol, published in 1937. Meeropol went to Dewitt Clinton High School and graduated in 1921. He then began to teach there for seventeen years. In the late 1930’s, Pellison said, “Meeropol ‘was very disturbed at the continuation of racism in America, and seeing a photograph of a lynching sort of put him over the edge’ (NPR). This picture which had haunted him for days, was his inspiration. Its message brings readers to realize what the strange fruit symbolizes to and gives the reader a sensation of imagery. The imagery in Abel Meeropol’s poem, Strange Fruit, reveals the brutal reality of racism in America during the early to mid 1900’s.
In his poems, Langston Hughes treats racism not just a historical fact but a “fact” that is both personal and real. Hughes often wrote poems that reflect the aspirations of black poets, their desire to free themselves from the shackles of street life, poverty, and hopelessness. He also deliberately pushes for artistic independence and race pride that embody the values and aspirations of the common man. Racism is real, and the fact that many African-Americans are suffering from a feeling of extreme rejection and loneliness demonstrate this claim. The tone is optimistic but irritated. The same case can be said about Wright’s short stories. Wright’s tone is overtly irritated and miserable. But this is on the literary level. In his short stories, he portrays the African-American as a suffering individual, devoid of hope and optimism. He equates racism to oppression, arguing that the African-American experience was and is characterized by oppression, prejudice, and injustice. To a certain degree, both authors are keen to presenting the African-American experience as a painful and excruciating experience – an experience that is historically, culturally, and politically rooted. The desire to be free again, the call for redemption, and the path toward true racial justice are some of the themes in their
A young African American boy named Richard was the protagonist of Black Boy. Growing up, Richard did not know the meaning of “black” and “whites” (Black). In his young days, Richard heard about a “black” boy who was beaten by a “white” man. In Richard’s world, only the fathers beat their sons, so he thought that this is what happened,
Wordsworth’s “The Thorn” starts off similar to an old horror film, beginning with a close-up of a thorn and then moving into a wider shot of it, a mountain, a mossy hill, and finally a woman in a scarlet cloak. But soon after, the lost and sorrowful beauty of atmosphere and setting that Wordsworth creates is explained through the tale of a sad, rejected woman, Martha Ray, whose baby has died and the stories, as a result, which build around her. Wordsworth introduces the thorn in the opening stanzas describing it negatively as, “A wretched thing forlorn,” and further personifies it by associating it with innocence and youth by stating it is, “Not higher than a two year’s child.” This description of the thorn directly connects the dead infant and the Hawthorn tree which grows over its grave. He foreshadows the death of a child using nature imagery. Wordsworth manages to mix his usual natural scenery into this poem to create its very essence by setting the reader to up to respond emotionally to nature.