Poem Analysis: Brown's The Ten Commandments

In the poem, “Romans 12:1,” brown tries to explain to the haters to himself. This happens in the poem in the line that says, “On the whole/ Hurt by me, they will not call me/Brother.” In this there may be some feeling of hatred, directed to another poem that references spiritual verses. In “The Ten Commandments,” the speaker talks about the sins and the sinfulness that he himself. A line in the poem says, “But I could be covetous. I could be a thief.” The speaker in this may be talking about the guilt that could be about not wanting to fighting back when he talks about “slapping” his lover’s wife. The poem ends with about whether he deserves the assault or not. Brown also speaks of a common fail to intervene in other’s domestic conflicts to help with their sympathy. By not intervening, it allowed himself to draw a line between battered woman and his own personal abuse self. The poem used with this ends with a person talking about the man’s passive role. (Hammack). Brown’s The New Testament was titled for this book might be an approach to tell us to “turn-the-other-cheek.” The poetry Brown writes is almost like is he is speaking to the black community against all the hate in the world that they have …show more content…
This helps the readers read on about what the poem is about. In The New Testament, Brown’s poems also explores the body’s beauty and the sexuality of them. This book of poems is of love and elegies that are confessions, and are of violence that are personal to the speaker and writer. For people who are black, their body attracts the violence and threats of scrutiny from other people in the world. In the poem, “Hustle,” the speaker says, “I eat humans who think any book full of black character is about race.” This means that the poem is about the tensions between the violence and the sex of the person.