Jean Toomer’s poem “Reapers,” written in 1923, emphasizes the vast cultural differences and inequalities between blacks and whites in America during the time period. He subliminally highlights the poor treatment of blacks through metaphor, symbolism, and other poetic devices. The poem “Reapers” is an octet consisting of four rhyming couplets. The rhyme scheme is aabbccdd, and the poem is written in iambic pentameter. “Reapers” is only one verse or stanza. Toomer employs many poetic devices to convey his message to the readers such as alliteration, consonance, and imagery. The opening line of the poem identifies who the reapers are in just one word: “black.” This sets the whole tone of the rest of the poem and gives the reader a visual of whom
the narrator is describing. The narrator does not speak of them as “dark” or “African,” but simply “black.” This is very blunt and straightforward to the point of almost being indifferent. Toomer uses alliteration and consonance to heighten the reader’s sense of the poem. In the first two lines, a hissing “s” sound is repeated to convey the harsh coldness of the scythes. Toomer writes: “Black reapers with the sound of steel on stones / Are sharpening scythes…” (1-2). The resulting sound of the letter s is similar to the sound of a knife being sharpened against a rock. It is a harsh, repetitive and unwelcome sound.
African-Americans’/ Affrilachians’ Suffering Mirrored: How do Nikky Finney’s “Red Velvet” and “Left” Capture events from the Past in order to Reshape the Present? Abstract Nikky Finney (1957- ) has always been involved in the struggle of southern black people interweaving the personal and the public in her depiction of social issues such as family, birth, death, sex, violence and relationships. Her poems cover a wide range of examples: a terrified woman on a roof, Rosa Parks, a Civil Rights symbol, and Condoleezza Rice, former Secretary of State, to name just a few. The dialogue is basic to this volume, where historical allusions to prominent figures touch upon important sociopolitical issues. I argue that “Red Velvet” and “Left”, from Head off & Split, crystallize African-Americans’ /African-Americans’ suffering and struggle against slavery, by capturing events and recalling historical figures from the past.
The Killer Angles The novel The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara depicts the story behind one of bloodiest and highly significant battle of the American Civil War. The Battle of Gettysburg consisted of 51,000-casualties between the Union and Confederate army forces. Mainly focused on letters, journal entries, and memoirs, Shaara tells the story of Gettysburg by using characters from both sides of the “spectrum”, the Confederate and Union army. These characters grasp the revolving points of view regarding the impending days of the war. Countless numbers of those views develop from characters throughout the novel. The characters include the Confederates own General Lee, General Longstreet; the Unions own Colonel Chamberlain, and soldiers from
The Killer Angels is a historical novel that recounts the battle of the Civil War, specifically focusing on the Battle of Gettysburg. Set from June 29 to July 3, 1863 and told from the point of view of several soldiers and commanding officers from both sides, Michael Shaara effectively illustrates the sentiments behind the war that tore America in two, from the strategic battle plans to the emotional hardships endured by all.
The novel The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara depicts the story behind one of the bloodiest, and highly significant, battles of the American Civil War, the battle of Gettysburg. The battle consisted of 51,000-casualties between the Union and Confederate army forces. Mainly focused on letters, journal entries, and memoirs, Shaara tells the story of Gettysburg by using characters from both sides of the war. The characters chosen grasp the divergent views regarding the impending days of the war, and countless numbers of those views develop throughout the novel. Such views come from the Confederates own General Lee and General Longstreet, and the Unions own Colonel Chamberlain and soldiers from both sides. From those depicted
In the novel there were many events that showed how the African Americans were in this time period. One of them being the court case of Tom Robinson, who was put under arrest for raping a white girl. Even though the white girl was the one coming on to him this resulted in her father walking in on them and hitting his daughter. Know this should have ended with the girl getting in trouble, but that was not the case in this time period it was a white man word versus a black man word and in this time a black man’s word was worth less than a dime. This was also shared in some level in the poem, this mask that it says African Americans had to wear to hide there pain and sorrow is the same thing that Tom Robinson had to do when facing life in jail, blacks had no choice they knew their fate in the hands of the
The theme throughout the two poems "A Black Man Talks of Reaping" and "From the Dark Tower" is the idea that African American live in an unjust
An Analysis of Jean Toomer's Cane In the prose fiction Cane: Jean Toomer uses the background of the Black American in the South to assist in establishing the role of the modernist black writer. While stylistic characteristics such as ambiguity of words and the irony of the contradictory sentences clearly mask this novel as a modernist work. Toomer draws upon his experiences and his perspective of the life of Blacks in Georgia to create a setting capable of demonstrating the difficulties facing the twentieth-century Black author. This presentation is both vivid and straightforward and while acknowledges the fall of slavery, it also examines the after-effects which remain in American life.
Reading these poems is an incredible learning experience because it allows readers to view segregation through the eyes of someone most affected by it. In the U.S. History course I took I didn’t take away the details and specific examples I did from reading and researching Brooks’ work. For example, the history textbook only mentioned one specific person who was affected by segregation, that person was Rosa Parks. The example of Rosa Parks demonstrated just one isolated incident of how black people were punished if they disobeyed the laws of segregation. In contrast, Brooks’ work demonstrates the everyday lives of black people living with segregation, which provides a much different perspective than what people are used to. An example, of this would be in Brooks’ poem “Bronzeville Woman in a Red Hat”. The speaker of this poem hired a black maid and referred to her as “it”(103). By not using the maid’s name or using the pronoun her, the speaker is dehumanizing the maid. This poem expresses to readers that white people thought that black people weren’t like them, that they weren’t even
Reflecting back on the most iconic figures in the history of horror cinema, characters like Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger, and Jason Voorhees still shine brighter than all the rest – even despite their current lack of utilization. In the meantime, an array of other “big bads,” ranging from Ghostface, Jigsaw, and Annabelle, has attempted to climb the proverbial ladder into the (imaginary) horror hall of fame.
Claude McKay’s poem “White Houses” expresses the anger and frustration blacks felt about the North.
...ites a short 33-line poem that simply shows the barriers between races in the time period when racism was still openly practiced through segregation and discrimination. The poem captures the African American tenant’s frustrations towards the landlord as well as the racism shown by the landlord. The poem is a great illustration of the time period, and it shows how relevant discrimination was in everyday life in the nineteen-forties. It is important for the author to use the selected literary devices to help better illustrate his point. Each literary device in the poem helps exemplify the author’s intent: to increase awareness of the racism in the society in the time period.
Pulitzer-Prize winning poets Rita Dove and Yusef Komunyakaa explore issues broader than rural black America. In “Parsley”, Dove canvasses the issues of inequality and oppression in Haiti; whereas in “Facing It”, Komunyakaa examines the Vietnam War from the perspective of a black solider and the post-traumatic stress he endures. What unites the two poets is their utilization of lyricism and rhythms to articulate personal narratives and create complex images of life through observations and experiences. Both Dove and Komunyakaa stress their individuality in their poetry by using words like “we” or “I” and employ imagery to express the emotions of the speakers in their poems. In “Parsley”, Dove writes, “we lie down screaming as rain punches through and we come up green. We cannot speak an R…” Though Dove has is not recounting personal experiences in the “Parsley”, her individuality in the poem illustrates her broad scope on the subject of racial inequality (for her, the discrimination and terrorization of Blacks in America and Haiti are intersectional); and ultimately it is racial inequality she seeks to destroy. Further touching on the theme of individuality, Komunyakaa’s “Facing It” is about the terrible traumatic experiences of Vietnam Veteran. The speaker is for some reason repressing his emotions when recounting on memories of the war at the Vietnam War Memorial. Komunyakaa writes, “I said I wouldn’t, dammit: No tears. I’m stone. I’m flesh.” These lines deepen the sense
The poems “Yet Do I Marvel”, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”, and “Tenebris” by Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Angelina Grimké, respectively, reflect attitudes towards the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance, which spanned the early twentieth century, brought about an explosion of African American culture that spread throughout the world. These poems use the figurative language techniques of allusion, personification, and imagery to reflect the ideas of many participants in the Harlem Renaissance, including revolution and unfairness.
To analyze Hughes’s poem thoroughly, by using Eliot’s argumentative essay, we must first identify the poem’s speaker and what is symbolic about the speaker? The title (“The Negro Speaks Of Rivers”) of the poem would hint off the speaker’s racial identity, as the word Negro represents the African-American race not only in a universal manner, but in it’s own individual sphere. T.S. Eliot’s essay, mentions that “every nation, every race, has not its own creative, but its own critical turn of mind”(549). In another sense, different societies have their own characteristics, however, with a racial mixture, shadowed elements can be formed. If one were to analyze in between the lines of Eliot’s essay and Hughes’s poem, he...
Over the course of the century chronicling the helm of slavery, the emancipation, and the push for civil, equal, and human rights, black literary scholars have pressed to have their voice heard in the midst a country that would dare classify a black as a second class citizen. Often, literary modes of communication were employed to accomplish just that. Black scholars used the often little education they received to produce a body of works that would seek to beckon the cause of freedom and help blacks tarry through the cruelties, inadequacies, and inconveniences of their oppressed condition. To capture the black experience in America was one of the sole aims of black literature. However, we as scholars of these bodies of works today are often unsure as to whether or not we can indeed coin the phrase “Black Literature” or, in this case, “Black poetry”. Is there such a thing? If so, how do we define the term, and what body of writing can we use to determine the validity of the definition. Such is the aim of this essay because we can indeed call a poem “Black”. We can define “Black poetry” as a body of writing written by an African-American in the United States that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of an experience or set of experiences inextricably linked to black people, characterizes a furious call or pursuit of freedom, and attempts to capture the black condition in a language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm. An examination of several works of poetry by various Black scholars should suffice to prove that the definition does hold and that “Black Poetry” is a term that we can use.