African Americans Writing About the Injustices Suffered by Their Race

Rage simmers behind the veil of Dunbar's poetic formality. In McKay's poem, however, the choler is obvious but the body structure of the poem allows it to build to a logical, frightening, and stirring conclusion. notwithstanding McKay intentionally uses the Shakespearean sonnet form and an imitation of Shakespearean expression to convert the struggles of his own people (the subject his readers easily identify) into a universal foretell for people to defend themselves against a parking lot enemy who wants to wipe them extinct. Thus there is little just about McKay's poem that would allow an uninformed reader to determine the place, time, author's race, or audience of this poem because he uses the language of the oppressors to urge the laden to fight against them.

Dunbar's poem is written in iambic tetrameter and contains very few haggle of more than one syllable. The short lecture emphasize the regular rocking calendar method of birth control that resembles a children's rhyme. And for the first one- triad lines of the poem the reader, dapple aware that something is being hidden, is not amply prepared for the fourth line where the shocking image of " rupture and bleeding hearts" emerges. It emerges only to have its intensity right away suppressed as the line ends with "we grimace," which rhymes almost childishly with "guile." But the legitimate depth of feeling is established by the personal credit line between the "torn and bleeding" and the "smile." The smile, a feature of the mask, hides the true feelings of the pe

The second stanza continues the regular rhythm but contemplates the sense of fatigue duty that comes from the intensity of feeling that peeks out from behind the masks in the first stanza.

Here the rhyme shunning of aabba seems about to continue but, as if the speaker was just in addition weary, the suggestion is made that just as the fury is hidden, the weariness should be kept out of sight as easily and it is almost a relief to "wear the mask." In the third stanza, as if the previous line had been broken off, the word "smile" (which continues the rhyme scheme) hides in the first line behind the call on Christ to witness the combination of weariness and anger that is given physical form in the "vile" trunk and weary "feet" that tread through the world as evidence of the feelings that are disguised by the mask.

ople who are Dunbar's subject -- just as the "smile" in this line masks the intensity of the words that precede it.

The poem is organized into four quatrains and a distich and in each section the status of the audience moves higher(prenominal) while that of their oppressors is lower. Thus the audience changes from "hogs" to the possessors of "precious blood" to "kins hands" while the enemy begin as "dogs," become "monsters," and are modify into a swarming, anonymous "common foe." In the final couplet, in which the audience is called on to die defending themselves, if necessary, the audience is "men" and the enemy remain dogs in a "pack." The progressi
Order your essay at Orderessay and get a 100% original and high-quality custom paper within the required time frame.