Little Brown Baby Literary Devices

Little Brown Baby by Paul Laurence Dunbar
Paul Laurence Dunbar is one of the most influential African American poets to gain a nationwide reputation. Dunbar the son of two former slaves; was born in 1872 in Dayton, Ohio. His work is truly one of a kind, known for its rich, colorful language, encompassed by the use of dialect, a conversational tune, and a brilliant rhetorical structure. The style of Dunbar’s poetry includes two distinct voices; the standard English of the classical poet and the evocative dialect of the turn of the century black community in America. His works include

While some features of AAVE are apparently unique to this variety, in its structure it also shows many similarities with other varieties including a number of standard and nonstandard English varieties spoken in the US and the Caribbean. Speakers and writers of this dialect use some distinctive aspects of the phonological, lexical, and grammatical traits associated with this dialect. Many sociolinguists would reserve the term AAVE for varieties which are marked by the occurrence of certain distinctive grammatical features.

Dunbar’s usage of this feature is shown much throughout the poem such as in line twenty three “Mammy an’ pappy do’ want him no mo’,”. The use of “ain’t” as a general preverbal negator is another feature of African American Vernacular, Dunbar expresses this trait in line twenty seven “He ain’t no tramp,”. Dunbar’s poem also has multiple negations which are a regular trait of African American Vernacular. In line twenty seven this is shown, “ner no straggler, of co’se;” “Little Brown Baby” also shows many phonological features of African American