Between The World And Me Poem Analysis

1863 to approximately 1964, coming up from almost 250 years of slavery, the world was filled with segregation. “Between the World and Me” (1935), a poem written by Richard Wright in the middle of it all, talks about a lynching taking place in the woods. It gives chilling details elucidating the torture of a black man for sleeping with a white woman. The captivating phraseology from the narrator’s perspective draws you in, giving its readers a clear vision of this fiendish extralegal act. Symbolism, personification and imagery is the most symbolic literary aspects of Wright’s poem. His poem shows the true nature of the supremacy of white people and what black people, especially a black man, had to endure during those times. Wright uses first …show more content…
His anger is intense when he writes of the discovery of the scene “a sapling pointing a blunt finger accusingly at the sky” as to accuse God for allowing this travesty to happen. He uses this line as if he were to the heavens “How could you let this happen to me?” Then when he writes about the ironic scene of the mercilessly burning victim when the speaker says, “Then my blood was cooled mercifully, cooled by a baptism of gasoline.” The victims’ skin is cooled by a baptism of gasoline which is not meant to cool his body at all. Baptism symbolically rebirth, depicting the victims’ rebirth to reality and knowledge gained of the hate crime happening at this time in history. At the end of the poem the speaker says “Now I am dry bones and my face a stony skull staring in yellow surprise at the sun” symbolizing the irony of enlightenment that comes at the end of this merciless killing. There is a shift from innocence to knowledge in this line; the victim learns that social injustice and man’s inhumanity to man imposed on him is …show more content…
Wright captures sublime eloquence tragicomic plight of the black existential struggle. This poem articulates the African American dialectal struggle to attain self-conscious personhood while traversing a landscape littered with the remnants of chattel slavery and darkened by the shadow of prejudice and injustice echoes deeply in the natural imagery of “Between the World and me”. The continual struggle for African Americans to strive and yet not yield in the face of overwhelming obstacles present in the social, cultural, political, and economic matrix of the America. This poem influences some genres in African American thought and expression and is a condition that has given rise to the literary eloquence of Wright. The effort to live the ideals of liberty, impartiality, and justice has been splintered by the raw and disturbing estrangement carried about by the significances of existing in a society pervaded by an infectious anti-black xenophobia. It is in this abyss unravelling the ideal from the real where African American thought finds a perilous