Juxtaposing Violence and Tranquility: Analyzing Southern Imagery

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1. Explain the contrasting imagery in the following lines:
Pastoral scene of the gallant South,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,

Those two lines provide very peaceful and very violence imagery. The first line describes a verdant and serene grassy plain a Southern state and then the line that follows describes the faces of a lynched person. The first line is juxtaposing the graphic line that follows which describes the face of a murdered black person who hung from tree.


2. What is the effect of the exclamation mark used in the last line of the second stanza?
The exclamation mark gives the notion of surprise or anger at the end of the second stanza. Once again, Meeropol compares a beautiful nature scene with a graphic human death. The exclamation mark at the end of the stanza and after the comparisons shows that Meeropol is surprised, angered, or both, that the lynching of black people continued to happen in the South at the time. …show more content…

Explain the suitability of the title to the poem.
I think the “strange fruit” that is referenced in the title is referring to the lynching of black people, specifically black men, which took place in the early to mid-20th century in the United States. Meeropol uses fruit as a metaphor in his poem since lynching victims were hung trees, similar to fruits. The strangeness of the “fruit” that hangs from the tree is both because there are human beings hanging from the tree and not fruits, and from the fact that the racism and lynching that took place were morally wrong, or

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