Poem Analysis: Ballad By Sonia Sanchez

The most preeminent quality of Sonia Sanchez “Ballad” remains the tone of the poem, which paints a didactic image. Sanchez is trying to tell this young people that we know nix about love as well as she is told old for it. In an unclear setting, the poem depicts a nameless young women and Sanchez engaged in a conversation about love. This poem dramatizes the classic conflict between old and young. Every old person believes they know more then any young person, all based on the fact that they have been here longer then all of us. The narrative voice establishes a tone of a intellectual understanding of love unraveling to the young women, what she comprehends to love is in fact not.
With the opening of the poem Sanchez laughs at how sure the young women is about love: “forgive me if I laugh you are so sure about love” (1-2) by her statement, she seems content that the young women clearly does not

know what she is talking about because she is too young: “you are so young” (3). The next line explains that all though she knows love very well she’s “too old to learn love” (4) Sanchez is enunciating that she knows all that is needed to know about love but at her age love is not a factor, passionate love no longer exist. The use of repetition of words in lines (2-4) helps to reinforce this the statement.
In the next stanza she is recounting all of her experience with love.

She remembering what it felt like when it rain when she was in love which she describes as being an explosion. Imagery is used to compare love and “rain exploding in the air” (5-6), a miracle of nature that people that isn’t in love would never otherwise experience. She also express the texture of a blade of grass became factual to her because of the love she felt once upon a time: “the green grass excreting her green wax is love” (7-8) Sanchez uses personification in this line making the grass to appear human. She then goes into depth describing her encounter with a man: “ I fixed my body under his and went to sleep in love” (17-19) getting lost in his love “all trace of me was wiped away” (20-21). Sanchez is thinking back when she was young and what she felt when she was in love, contradicting herself. She keeps telling the young women “you are too young for love (11-12) but then remembers while thinking back on her experience with love that she was once young and in love, this is want you call

irony.
In the final stanza Sanchez now realizing the similarities of what the young women feels to what she once felt, kind of apologizes for being so hard but still she’s sticking to what she said before: “forgive me if I smile young heiress of a naked dream you are so young and i too old to learn of love.” (22-25). This poem often used striking imagery and figures of speech to convey its message making a pose poem. She also used metaphor when describing how she felt when she was with her man in lines 20-21. Want Sanchez is trying to point is that many aren’t ready for love no matter the age.