The last two sentences of the poem is a couplet, emphasizing the theme of the poem, “Like men we’ll face the motorist, cowardly pack, / Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!” (13-14) These two sentences in the couplet, illuminate the meaning and theme of the poem by summarizing the other twelve lines. This couplet adds power to the poem, as if the final words mean the most. The cowardly pack, as stated in this line, connects to the murderous dogs in Line Three, tying the biast white men into the final conclusion of the poem. The author is telling the audience to fight back and if they die, they will die nobly, not in vain. It’s a battle cry, to fight for their lives. McKay has used figurative language and form to show the theme of his poem, rhythm is also important. …show more content…
McKay uses this rhythm to form a battle cry to motivate the audience, in every line there are five iambs, patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables. The author employs this technique in every line to add rhythm to his words, “What though before us lies an open grave?” (12) This line, along with every other line, has an iambic pentameter. It tells the audience how to read the poem, how to understand the power of the poem. When reading, rhythm helps understand different stanzas, lines or other things as well. The author uses repetition as well, he repeats the phrase, “If we must die,” to emphasize that the audience should be motivated to fight for honor. The word ‘must’ acts as a powerful word, showing that being killed by the white men is most likely to happen, there should be a way to honorably fight for the end of racism, because if the audience has to die, the audience should chose a noble way. Rhythm is used to show the capability of the words in a single
Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey is a coming of age story that filled with suspense and mystery keeping us captivated till the end. Set in the 1960’s in an old mining town if Corrigan, where everyone knows one another. I certainly agree with weartholdcoat’s opinions on the novel, it’s a great thrilling read that keeps you completely hooked. Silvey uses various techniques like narrative and language conventions, theme and Australian context to achieve such a captivating finish.
introduce and emphasize the notions of doubles and tangible abstractions without ever revealing the true identity of Wilson’s double. Finally, despite, culminating in the most direct and paramount manifestation of the abstraction of William Wilson’s conscience in the prank incident, the reader is still unaware of the story’s conclusion, but is well aware of the complications and notions that lead to the conclusion. In his book “Edgar Allan Poe: Rhetoric and Style”, Brett Zimmerman details the critique of other authors that Poe’s style “in his Gothic tales, stylistic qualities [are] considered excessive, obnoxious … [and that] Poe’s ‘writing smells of the thesaurus’ and that his ‘vocabulary tends to be abstract’” However, this outwardly excessive
In the beginning of the poem the tone seems to be adventurous and playful. In the first stanza, Thiel describes her father and his friend running through towns in Germany to find lettuce because they hadn’t eaten all day. Thiel’s use of imagery makes it seem as though these young boys are out on an adventure. The playful tone sets in when Thiel describes her father and his friend racing one another. Thiel states, “His friend ran a few lengths ahead, like a wild rabbit across the grass” (pg 442). The simile portrays his friend as running free, without a care in the world. Although these boys were in the war, this playful tone is able to express that they were still teenagers and wanted to have fun. The tone quickly changes as he watches his friend step on a mine and his whole body is scattered throughout the field. This horrifying image causes the tone of the poem to change from playful and adventurous to dark and angry.
In the poem “Evening Hawk,” Warren utilizes a plethora of words and phrases to elaborate upon his central themes of death and ignorance of time and history. Through his impactful imagery and powerful verbs, the author transports the audience into an eerie, vampy world of the hawk and its predatory nature in the darkness of the evening, ending the day.
Many poets use different literary devices in poems to express their ideas and thoughts in an artistic way.
Edgar Allan Poe uses several writing techniques to create a single concentrated effect of unending despair in his classic poem, "The Raven." The most noticeable technique is the use of repetition. Just as repeated exposure to cold raindrops can chill one to the bone, repeated exposure to words of hopelessness and gloom creates a chilling effect. Poe saturates the reader with desperate futility by repetitive use of the words "nothing more" and "nevermore." These two phrases, used in refrain to end seventeen of the poem's eighteen stanzas, drench the reader with melancholy. Poe also uses repetition to spark the reader's curiosity. He refers to the sound of rapping or tapping eight times in the first six stanzas. The unexplained repetitive sound helps the reader identify with the search for answers that the speaker is experiencing. Poe makes use of repetition to emphasize feeling with the words, "'Surely,' said I, 'surely that is something at my window lattice'" (33). Repeating the word "surely" adds a sense of desperation concerning the search.
In Claude McKay “If we must die” the primary theme is death, but not on how you’re going to die, but how you’re going to face death in certain ways. We get the idea that the speaker of "If We Must Die" isn 't thinking about death in the theoretical sense; he 's actually facing it. It 's not a question of whether he will die or what will happen when he dies, it about how he will meet death. “Pressed to the wall, Dying, But fighting back!” and “ though far outnumbered, let us show us brave, and for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!” show how they will fight back before death occurs as a sign of influence.
The speaker suggests in line 3 to allow the choir to sing a bittersweet song to drown out his/her shaken outcries. The speaker in this part of the poem is either showing anguish or enduring some type of beating. Line 5 says three words, “Beat the drums,” as a continuation of the motif music depression. However, the next line line is a continuation of the repeated line from line 1. The poet advises the drums to obliterate the outcries and objections like I stated earlier.
In the second poem “If We Must Die” McKay uses “If we must die, O let us nobly die,”(McKay, line 5). McKay says he wants to die with a legacy and be remembered. McKay uses these two lines to shed light on problems in society. In addition to McKay, another Harlem Renaissance poet was James Weldon Johnson. Johnson used his poems to shed light on problems in society.
The final stanza contrasts in the form because it is a couplet, so the poem ends in the same way to a sonnet. The speaker does not tell us what his views are. We know that he “thought hard for us all” before he pushed the deer over the canyon edge (line 17). It is suggested that his feelings of tension between modern technology and nature. The benefits of technology come with a price and Stafford suggests for the readers to think about
McKay’s long poem contains many progressions. There is no space between lines; it is a continuous poem as it requires the readers remain focus from the beginning to the end. This poem could be effectively presented as a speech to soldiers who are about to fight with their enemies. Therefore, the poem must be long so that it can gradually stir up the morale of the soldiers. Each line is almost the same length, indicating the formal attitude of the speaker who is possibly the leader. Also, as a motivational speech, it has to be consistent so that it can capture the soldiers’ attention without distraction. However, in contrast, the length of “Harlem” is short, and the poem is inconsistent: it consists of eleven lines broken into four stanzas. The first and last stanzas contain one line, while the other two contain seven and two lines respectively. Some lines are short, others are longer. Therefore, readers might become uncomfortable or frustrated while reading it; but this seem to be the poet’s purpose, Hughes utilizes the length of his poem to convey to readers, especially the whites, the blacks’ feelings of dreams being deferred because of racism and injustice in society. Additionally, because the poem is short, the readers might understand Hughes’ point quickly. It also implies that the speaker has
The rhyme scheme in the poem is very reliable and consistent being made of eight lines which rhyme in an aabbaaaa, ccddcccc pattern. Personification is another device used to illustrate the purpose of the poem and it ties in with imagery and metaphor as well. The iambic pentameter continues throughout the poem until one gets to the eighth line in each stanza. There it becomes iambic dimeter. As one reads this poem, it tends to read in somewhat of a sing song tone which seems rather odd for such a bleak poem.
The poem comprises three stanzas which are patterned in two halves; the rule of three is ingeniously used throughout the poem to create tension and show the progression of the soldiers’ lives. There is a variety of rhyming schemes used – possibly Duffy considered using caesural rhyme, internal rhyme and irregular rhyme to better address the elegiac reality. The rhythm is very powerful and shows Duffy’s technical adroitness. It is slightly disconcerting, and adds to the other worldly ambience of the poem. Duffy uses a powerful comparative in each stanza to exemplify the monstrosity and extent of war, which is much worse than we imagine; it develops throughout each stanza, starting with a syntactical ‘No; worse.’ to ‘worse by far’ and ending on ‘much worse’. Similarly, the verbs used to describe the soldier’s shadow as he falls shows the reader the journey of the shadow, as if it’s the trajectory of soldiers’ lives. At first, the shadow is as an act...
Poetry was one of the main forms of art that introduced racial identity for American-Americans. Claude McKay was a Jamaican writer and poet who was an influential figure in the Harlem Renaissance. A chilling piece of work, If We Must Die by McKay stirs deep and powerful emotions in any who reads it and is inspired by the race riots during the Red Summer of 1919. The poem serves as an anthem for motivation that represents the African-American plight. Graphic and full of vengeance, this poem is not about a story, but rather consists of the speaker insisting that his men take action . McKay utilizes imagery to its fullest extent creating an end result which makes one feel like they are getting this spoken at them, and it is in first person. The
Any attempt to change that or threaten it is met with increased brutality. As the poem continues, the author speaks of dying but only accepting death if it is honorable and not in vain. The speaker proceeds with saying, “then even the monsters we defy / Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!” (Lines 7-8).