The first poem is “Blood” by Naomi Shihab Nye. This poem is narrated by an adult Arab woman. As the reader we learn in the first line that our narrator is, “A true Arab." This poem is a direct narration of Naomi’s life. Naomi’s father and family became refugees in 1948 when the state of Israel was created. She said that her father lost everything during these troubling times. While the war was taking place, Arabs were scattered all over the world in refugee camps or lucky enough to find a home. We learn that Naomi and her family grew up in a home in Missouri. The line, “Cupping the buzzer instantly while the host with the swatter just stared”, indicates they are living in a place where Arab customs are seen as abnormal. We can also infer that she is …show more content…
now in a different country because she says, “Arabs believed watermelon could heal fifty ways. I changed these to fit the occasion.” All her old customs and beliefs need to be forgotten to assimilate to the American culture. The third stanza tells the reader that she did not know she was an Arab while growing up. When someone came knocking on her door asking her where the Arab was she replied, “We didn’t have one.” This proves her father kept his identity and the past a secret from his daughter. Her father then eventually tells her about their ethnicity and his past. In the last two stanzas we learn our narrator is stricken by the headlines that are appearing in the news. The Palestine-Israeli War is taking place and Naomi does not know what to think. The tragedies taking place are out of their hands and have a horrifying past. The racism is a problem between the two countries. Naomi asks, “What flag can we wave?” She is conflicted about what her identity is. She wonders if she should raise her American flag and not care about the war happening because she is not a part of that culture anymore, or if she should raise her Arab flag and stand up for her ethnicity. She eventually finds herself and decides to raise the flag of peace saying, “I wave the flag of stone and seed”. Naomi then calls her father to tell him what has taken place, and he cannot believe what he is hearing. Naomi then drives off to see is she can wrap her head around what is occurring in the world and why people have to act with violence and hatred. These occurrences that take place in the poem make “Blood” a suitable title. The title represents the blood that Naomi has within her. She is a true Arab as her father says and she needs to represent her culture. Blood also represents the blood that is lost by the citizens of Palestine during the time of war, both figuratively and metaphorically. Between 3,000 and 13,000 Arabs lost their life during this war. On the other hand, during this war, civilians fled to different countries to try and get away from the violence. “Blood” was also lost in the sense that the culture and tradition was lost when these civilians were forced to integrate into a new country. While the title of the poem says a lot about it, the confused tone of this poem reveals even more about it. Naomi speaks about a time in her life when she just lived an average American life, when she did not know about her Arabic past. However, once she discovers more about her roots, she is fascinated with the culture she came from. She wants to embrace her past, however, she finds it is not accepted in the United States. She talked about having to change to fit the occasion. Another time when the poem showed confusion was when Naomi was asking, “What flag can we wave?” She was conflicted between what culture she should embody. Her ethnic roots or the culture she has known her entire life. The confused tone of this poem is set up in a structure that first starts out with a quatrain. Next, a tercet is used in the poem, which is three lines in a stanza. This stanza talks about a memory in the spring when conditions were harsh and her hands were peeling. She then goes into to talking about how Arabs believe watermelon can cure anything. However, she must change her Arabic beliefs because she is living in America. At this time Naomi is a child, but she knows about her Arabic roots. An octave comes next, which is eight lines in one stanza. The narrator starts talking about a memory she had years before about a girl knocking on her door asking for an Arab. Naomi responds with, “We didn’t have one.” This line shows that this is before the spring memory. Naomi does not know about her family’s background and where her father came from. She believed everyone in her family was born and raised in the United States. Then, a sestet where, in six lines, it jumps to present day. This stanza talks about the war that is taking place between Palestine and Israel. Finally, the poem finishes out with another octave, where the narrator is on the phone with her father talking about the war. Naomi cannot wrap her head around the horrific displays of hatred are taking place in her father’s home country. She drives off trying to figure out why there has to be bitterness in this world. In addition to the structure, Naomi uses space to break up events taking place in the poem. Each time there is a break within the poem, Naomi changes her thought and starts talking about something new. First, she talks about distinct memories she has. Each new memory is broken up with a space in between. Towards the end, the rest of the poem is in present day. The shape of the poem is all over the place much like the poem. There is not a single stanza that contains lines of similar length. This is possibly to show that Naomi has had ups and downs in her life. Her ups would be discovering who she really is and taking pride in her identity. However, the downs include having to throw away that identify for a new one. Moving away from how the poem is set up, the diction of this poem is neutral.
Naomi uses proper language, however, her poem has a simplistic tone to it. An enjambment is a line that has no end punctuation and runs into another line. There is only one example of an enjambment in the poem, and it is in line 3: “Cupping the buzzer instantly while the host with the swatter stared.” She continued the sentence with a break in the text to separate the two lines showing the difference between an Arabic culture and an American culture. Naomi uses a lot of end stopped lines throughout her poem. End stopped lines give the poem a pause. The punctuation of the poem consists of mostly periods, until the end when more question marks begin to appear. In the beginning of the poem Naomi knew exactly who she was, a true Arab, and she was proud to be one. Then, in the third stanza when she is first being told who she is we see her first questions appear. Naomi is a confused about her culture and wants to know more. Then, in the fourth stanza Naomi really does not know who she is and she asks, “What flag can we wave?” Lastly, the fifth stanza has the most questions because Naomi not only does not know who she is but is begging for
help. Figurative language pops up often throughout this poem. It has many uses of alliteration within it. Line 4’s “swatter stared” is an example of alliteration. Another usage of alliteration is in line 12. “Shihab--shooting star.” Naomi uses a simile in line 5 when saying, “Our palms peeled like snakes”. This simile is showing the harsh conditions that Naomi had to go through during the spring. Personification is used a lot throughout this poem. Personification is giving human characteristics to inanimate objects. Naomi first starts out by saying, “Borrowed from the sky”. Shihab is a name meaning shooting star and Naomi said it is a good name that is borrowed from the sky. However, nothing can be taken from the sky. Another use of personification was in line 26, “to plead with the air”. Naomi is begging God to stop all the racism and terrorism that is occurring back at home. Naomi uses an allusion in her poem to reference another one of her poems. In line 18 she talks about a Homeless fig, this is referencing a poem called My Father and the Fig Tree. The fig tree was a symbol to her father’s old country. Refrain is a word that is used more than once in the poem. The word that is used over and over is true Arab. Naomi wants the reader to grasp that she is first proud to be an Arab. She inherits all the customs and traditions Arabas partake in. Then, all the way up until the very last line she asks, “What does a true Arab do now?” At this point Naomi is confused and doubting her ethnicity. Does she continue to show her culture off to America or is it time to change due to the bad reputation Arabs are getting? The second poem is “American Sublime” by Elizabeth Alexander. The meaning of this poem is about the history and past experiences Elizabeth Alexander has gone through as an African American woman. The poem is about America and how blacks perceive American during the 19th century. America is supposed to be The Land of the Beautiful however, Elizabeth does not have many adjectives to describe this Beautiful land. She describes it as being. “small scale, gentle luminosity”. However, when she talks about the Sublime land she uses, “territorial, vast, immense, unknown, awful, monumental, transcend, and transcending”. Meaning, America is huge, it has a rough and unknown terrain, and its borders seem to go on forever. Perhaps, Elizabeth is comparing the viewpoints of America between a white man to a black man. The white man sees America as a small territory with just enough hope. On the other hand, the black man sees America as dreadful, massive piece of land that has yet been discovered. During this time blacks were slaves and the possibility for freedom was the unimaginable. There was little hope for blacks to ever escape and explore the vast world outside. But then, our narrator tells this man to “Go West and West young man…Leave shark-infested waters.” Despite the harsh winters and adversity one will face, anything is better than it is there.
Moving forward into chapter seventeen of Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian”, Glanton’s crew rode on as the Apaches they drank with held back, as they refused to ride through the night. The next night Glanton’s men made a fire and discussed what’s happened in their group, the members who’d been killed. Then brought up there possibly being life on other planets. The Judge immediately disagreed though and did a trick, as if that was being the proof to his point or something.
Not only is this a beautiful example of her rhyme but also a great illustration of her ability to imagine and recreate a scene, it feels as though you yourself are leaping and bounding to freedom as you read this. In lines 17-20 a questioning of how she will define herself once she escapes arises, she asks if she can truly call herself an American. Beautifully saying,
It is very clear that the narrator is aggravated with the ignorance of some people as they assume she is supposed to sound different than she does because she is black. To emphasize her agitation throughout the poem, the narrator asks rhetorical questions such as; "Was I supposed to sound lazy, dropping syllables here, there, not finishing words but slurring the final letter so that each sentence joined the next, sliding past the listener? Were certain words off limits, too erudite, too scholarly for someone with a natural tan? And Does everyone in your family speak alike?"
Though most of the poem is not dialogue, from what little speaking there is between the...
Even if these poems had the same theme of the delayment of a dream, each poet’s vision towards this dream is explored differently, where readers are able to grasp both the effects and potentials of a dream deferred, through the use of imagery. Nonetheless, both poems had fulfilled the role of many distinguished poems during the period; to communicate African-Americans’ desires to live a life of equality and free from prejudice.
words represent the gang’s lack of language skills. This symbolizes uneducated boys talking. She does it with such vivid verse and ethnic slang that it gives this poem a unique style.
The dash in Emily Dickinson’s poetry, initially edited away as a sign of incompletion, has since come to be seen as crucial to the impact of her poems. Critics have examined the dash from a myriad of angles, viewing it as a rhetorical notation for oral performance, a technique for recreating the rhythm of a telegraph, or a subtraction sign in an underlying mathematical system.1 However, attempting to define Dickinson’s intentions with the dash is clearly speculative given her varied dash-usage; in fact, one scholar illustrated the fallibility of one dash-interpretation by applying it to one of Dickinson’s handwritten cake recipes (Franklin 120). Instead, I begin with the assumption that “text” as an entity involving both the reading and writing of the material implies a reader’s attempt to recreate the act of writing as well as the writer’s attempt to guide the act of reading. I will focus on the former, given the difficulties surrounding the notion of authorial intention a.k.a. the Death of the Author. Using three familiar Dickinson poems—“The Brain—is wider than the Sky,” “The Soul selects her own Society,” and “This was a Poet—It is that,”—I contend that readers can penetrate the double mystery of Emily Dickinson’s reclusive life and lyrically dense poetry by enjoying a sense of intimacy not dependent upon the content of her poems. The source of this intimacy lies in her remarkable punctuation. Dickinson’s unconventionally-positioned dashes form disjunctures and connections in the reader’s understanding that create the impression of following Dickinson through the creative process towards intimacy with the poet herself.
For the majority of the novel, she lives with Obasan and takes after her by not speaking much. Rough Lock Bill comments on her shy silence and praises her for it, saying that, “Smart people don’t talk too much” (Kogawa 174). He even scolds himself for talking too much on an occasion, thinking that too much talk equals not much thought behind the words. This contrast is also illustrated by Naomi’s observations of her two aunts: “one lives in sound, the other in stone” (Kogawa 39), meaning she sees Aunt Emily’s vocal tendencies as simplistic and plain, while Obasan is set in stoic silence and indirect responses. Magnussen observes: “Naomi seems to honour Obasan’s silences above Emily’s words…. Naomi’s imagery articulates her confidence that Obasan’s stony silence shields a more authentic language” (Magnussen 6). Naomi sees Obasan’s silences harder to decipher and therefore more meaningful than Aunt Emily’s straight speaking. However, toward the end of the novel Naomi finds herself wanting to break free from the chains of silence keeping her. She states that “[she wants] to break loose from the heavy identity…. unable to shout or sing or dance, unable to scream or swear, unable to laugh, unable to breathe out loud” (Kogawa 218). Though Naomi is full of grief, she does not know how to deal with it and the silence of Obasan and the obligations of politeness feel
In these poems when reading them even if they have a strong American influence to them, there is still a distinct Native tone to them. They are not completely westernized. This is noticeable in the way the
For example, in “The Rain”, the entire poem has lines that are enjambed, “Is it / that never the ease, / even the hardness, / of rain falling”(8-11). The phrase or idea talked about in one line does not end at the end of a line, it continues on for several lines and sometimes several stanzas. In addition to the poem “The Rain”, enjambment can be seen in the poem “For Love”. Examples of enjambment can be found frequently throughout this poem, but specifically from lines 15, to 18. The poem reads, “I wouldn 't either, but / what would I not / do, what prevention, what...”. The subject talked about in these three lines is not thoroughly explained in the lines given, as the poem continues it discusses different subjects that are also spread out through several lines, with no one line being about one subject. The meaning of what Creeley is trying to describe can only be found by reading several lines of the poem because of the way he structured his poems. In the article "Love and Frangibility: An Appreciation of Robert Creeley", Heather Mchugh EXPLAINS, “ First of all, he 's often miscast as a rebel against poetic forms, foot soldier in the resistance against prosodic refinement... I believe that Robert Creeley 's abstemious formality nourishes a luxury of readings”. Mchugh SAYS that the line structure that Creeley uses is
Amiri Baraka and Abdul Ali are black nationalists whose poetic content stems from the struggles and suffering of African American people since slavery. There are many parallels regarding subject matter, theme, and tone in poems Baraka and Ali have written, including “Ka’Ba,” “21 Breaths for Amadou Diallo,” “Notes for a Speech,” and “Fatherhood Poem No.1.” Important themes in these works include the unity of black people, the suffering due to discrimination, and the distress resulting from oppression and segregation. The authors also employ horrific, resentful, and gloomy tones in their works. Amiri Baraka and Abdul Ali effectively utilize subject matter, theme, and tone to provide insight on the adversities that unify “every black man in America"
Then, she says, “we paused before a house that seemed a swelling of the ground” (lines17-18) as a metaphor for her grave. Her welcoming tone continues as she uses a house, which isknown to be a friendly environment, to describe the place she is buried once she dies.Throughout the poem, there is a definite rhythm scheme which helps keep the poemsoothing. Rhythm is very important because it dictates the direction; whether it is a positive ornegative direction. When there is a nice rhythm it keeps the flow in a nice harmony which showsthe poem is meant to have a positive attitude. The first and third line in every stanza are made upof eight syllables, four feet, and the whole poem uses the basic iambic meter. This furtherintensifies the poem by helping create a flow. The use of rhymes and slant rhymes also give thepoem a flow. "Me" rhymes with "immortality" and, farther down the poem, with "civility" and,finally, "eternity." There are also slant rhymes like "chill" and "tulle" which helps balance out therhythm. Dickinson also capitalized nouns, which intensified the structure to help the rhythm ofthe poem. Capitalization makes the words stand out more which emphasizes their importance.Those dashes have a
Poetry is very difficult to interpret because everybody has a different approach, understand, meaning and point of view. My next writer is an African Americans whose poem is” Black Art” by Amiri Baraka “Black Art”. In the poem “ Black Art “, the poem is dedicated to African American to wake up and reverse the situation , by taking control over everything . The author urges the audience to be conscious and unconscious about African-American. Amiri is saying I need to see all the hardworking of the African American not just word but reality, proof, demonstration, and action been taking. In addition, in a poem the author express his anger; frustration to the audience how he feels and the action need take
On line 16 Bishop uses a long hyphen sara to pause before she breaks down and says “¬¬–̶ Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture/”. She is remembering the qualities of the lover she lost. On line 17 when Bishop uses the present tense words “I love…” as if admitting that she still loves the person she lost. Then again as followed on line 17 “…I shan’t have lied. It’s evident”. She admits that she lied in her poem. As mentioned before the thesis repeats in line 18 of the last quatrain stanza but this time uses an extra word, “too”. The word “too” actually means that losing is “not so easy” as she had believed it was at the beginning of the poem. The use of enjambment throughout the poem goes beyond the literal meaning. Bishop’s use of enjambment within the lines interpret that when one loses someone it is not the end of that pain but rather that the pain will always be present and what matters is how one person copes with that pain and accepts the fact that one will always lose. There is much resistance in Bishop’s words from the beginning of the poem when she uses the word “master” as if having control and then switches to the opposing word “disaster” as if out of control. The use of Bishops words at the beginning of the poem refers to her earlier years when she lost her father when she was eight months old which was not so hard
In both texts, a key concept is implemented: ‘Despair.’ Despair is presented in both poems through the oppression of the Jewish People; in both poems they manage to create a feeling of alienation in conjunction with isolation through manipulating their imagery and tone. ‘Refugee Blues’ is rooted in the 1930′s pre-second world war, when the Jewish communities were being punished for countless mistakes they had not even made. If we break down the title of both texts we can already begin to interpret the different tones, as well as emotions that will be in the pieces. ‘Refugee’ comes from the word refuge, which means safety, safety for the people who have been forced to leave their country in order to escape war, persecution, or natural disaster. It is almost ironic how Auden uses this as his title as the Jews were anything but ‘Safe.’ ‘Blues’ is a music genre; typically it offers a slow, calm rhythm yet creates an uplifting vibe. Developed by the African-American communities, originating in the 19th century, around the ‘Deep South’ of the United States. Furthermore, in ‘The Last Night’ is set in France during World War Two, when the Nazis occupied and controlled France. If we begin to break down ‘The Last Night,’ we can immediately pick up yet again that the poem is going to involve death, or the end of someone/something. If we look at the second line of the poem, ‘deportees might write a final message,’ the word ‘final’ already gives us a clue that this may be the deportees final chance to write a message before they die.