“Ballad of Birmingham” by Dudley Randall addresses the racial tension between white people and black people during the 1960s. The poem provides a glimpse into the discrimination from the perspective of a young daughter and her protective mother that plagued the streets of Birmingham. On September 15, 1963, in a white supremacist act, four member of the Ku Klux Klan planted bombs underneath the African-American Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. The explosions brought down the eastern side of the church, raining dust and rubble on members inside participating in the ongoing service. Ultimately, the bombs injured twenty members of the church and killed four girls, all under the age of 15. This poem is a tribute to the four innocent girls who perished in the bombings. “Ballad of Birmingham” starts out with a young girl talking to her mother. The unnamed girl wants to go downtown and march in the streets of Birmingham in a freedom march;
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The poem is a ballad, or a song narrated in short stanzas, which allows the rhythm, flow, and meter to easily stick in the readers’ minds. With eight comprehensible quatrains, the poem utilizes iambic meter and an ABCB rhyme scheme. The first half of the poem resembles a dialogue between the daughter and her mother, introducing the conflict of discrimination they faced during the mid-20th century. The last half of the poem introduces an unnamed speaker who narrates the rest of the events from a third person omniscient point of view, scoping out of the dialogue for readers to see the big picture of the poem and concluding the tragedy. However, the last couplet rapidly switches back to the original format of dialogue, as the mother desperately calls out for her lost child. This sudden change of narration, or volta, serves as a literary device that introduces a new idea that leaves readers to interpret the meaning
The poem is a ballad, or a song narrated in short stanzas, which allows the rhythm, flow, and meter to easily stick in the readers’ minds. With eight comprehensible quatrains, the poem utilizes iambic meter and an ABCB rhyme scheme. The first half of the poem resembles a dialogue between the daughter and her mother, introducing the conflict of discrimination they faced during the mid-20th century. The last half of the poem introduces an unnamed speaker who narrates the rest of the events from a third person omniscient point of view, scoping out of the dialogue for readers to see the big picture of the poem and concluding the tragedy. However, the last couplet rapidly switches back to the original format of dialogue, as the mother desperately calls out for her lost child. This sudden change of narration, or volta, serves as a literary device that introduces a new idea that leaves readers to interpret the meaning