Paul Laurence Dunbar's An Ante-Bellum Sermon

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An Ante-Bellum Sermon Sermons will always be a part of people’s lives. Sermons are messages from God to all different people. They can be given in different ways to help others understand deeper. For example, in Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem, “An Ante-Bellum Sermon” the dialect and and rhythm is made so slaves can relate and interpret more on what they are hearing. According to Poets.org, Paul Laurence Dunbar is a writer of the Modern Period was born to married, freed slaves that separated soon after he was born. His father died while Dunbar was a teen. He was raised by his widowed mother, who helped and supported him to be a better writer. It was unknown for blacks to go to school, but not only did he go to school surrounded by whites, but he was at the top of his class. His mother is a writer so he follows her footsteps. He is one of the first African American writers of the twentieth century to be not only …show more content…

According to the Poetry Foundation, Dunbar uses his form a=or writing to give an “ impressive representation” of black life in the south. The first lines of the poem, “We is gathahed hyeah, my brothahs, In di howlin' wildaness” (622) translates to We is gathered here, my brothers, in this hollering wilderness. The spelling of the words and the dialect in the poem make the reader sound more like the African American slave during the period and makes the poem more realistic. Once the reader first begins to read it seems to be that they are having a hard time understanding, but once they continue, they will notice that the writing, spelling, and rhyming style is unique to show the flow of words. In another line, “An' de lan' shall hyeah his thundah, Lak a blas' f'om Gab'el's ho'n” (623), it translates to And the land shall hear his thunder like a blast from Gabriel's horn. Here shows how African American spoke and pronounced their words like

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