A fourteen-year old African boy, who was brutally slain and mutilated for potentially whistling or being flirtatious towards a white woman at a grocery store in 1955. A poet, Kait Rokowski once wrote: “Nothing ever ends poetically. It ends and we turn it into poetry. All that blood was never once beautiful. It was just red” (54). Marilyn Nelson’s takes this exact approach to describe how Emmett Till died. She does not attempt to hide the atrocity of the crime behind fancy poetic language. Although she does turn it into poetry, blood and death are never beautiful in her lines, they are not attributed to any higher purpose, and do not lead to a heroically elated ending. The poem is exceptionally profound in its depiction of the slaughter. Every part of the poem looks into the identified past and the approximate future of the young prey. In the route of the poem, Nelson allegorically knits a wreath of flowers to memorialize Emmett Till, so by means of employing the customary language of flowers, she expresses various themes, including justice, loss, and commemoration. Each dominant sonnet builds upon the last line of that previous one which indeed creates a truly genuine link between all of them right through. By selecting a very challenging structure, Nelson sought to lag herself from the sting of her subject and make the veracity of the poem
A fourteen-year old African boy, who was brutally slain and mutilated for potentially whistling or being flirtatious towards a white woman at a grocery store in 1955. A poet, Kait Rokowski once wrote: “Nothing ever ends poetically. It ends and we turn it into poetry. All that blood was never once beautiful. It was just red” (54). Marilyn Nelson’s takes this exact approach to describe how Emmett Till died. She does not attempt to hide the atrocity of the crime behind fancy poetic language. Although she does turn it into poetry, blood and death are never beautiful in her lines, they are not attributed to any higher purpose, and do not lead to a heroically elated ending. The poem is exceptionally profound in its depiction of the slaughter. Every part of the poem looks into the identified past and the approximate future of the young prey. In the route of the poem, Nelson allegorically knits a wreath of flowers to memorialize Emmett Till, so by means of employing the customary language of flowers, she expresses various themes, including justice, loss, and commemoration. Each dominant sonnet builds upon the last line of that previous one which indeed creates a truly genuine link between all of them right through. By selecting a very challenging structure, Nelson sought to lag herself from the sting of her subject and make the veracity of the poem