StudentShare
Contact Us
Sign In / Sign Up for FREE
Search
Go to advanced search...
Free

Harlem by Langston Hughes: Meditation or Threat - Essay Example

Cite this document
Summary
In the essay “Harlem by Langston Hughes: Meditation or Threat?” the author discusses the poem where the sensory images of taste, touch, and smell become metaphors for the idea that if important issues are left unresolved, they eventually change and become dangerous, with disastrous consequences…
Download free paper File format: .doc, available for editing
GRAB THE BEST PAPER93.1% of users find it useful
Harlem by Langston Hughes: Meditation or Threat
Read Text Preview

Extract of sample "Harlem by Langston Hughes: Meditation or Threat"

The poet recognized the suffering and wasted potential, and the threat of violence in Harlem, as the peoples' dreams were deferred. With the last line, he is issuing a warning that injustice and deprivation could result in that explosion. Question 2. "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" Dylan Thomas: I have chosen this because it is full of a passion for life and refuses to accept that death is inevitable. The speaker wants to keep his father alive (it was written when Thomas' father was dying), so it is his voice.

His repetition of "Do not go gentle into that good night" and "Rage, rage against the dying of the light" at the end of alternate stanzas, is full of urgent, vibrant vitality; he is willing his father and all who are old, to remember the wonder of life and stay to accomplish more. He includes all kinds of men, "wise men", "good men", "wild men" and "grave men", all qualities his father may have had. I like the way opposites emphasize power and differences: "Light" and "dark", "see" and "blind", "gentle" and "rage" and the auditory and physical imagery in words like "forked" and "danced", "sang" and "grieved" make the poem pulsate with movement and feeling.

The themes of death and loss make the poet angry, and the images are like prizes offered to tempt his father to stay. He would accept anything from his father "Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears I pray" if only he would stay alive. Thomas rages against death as a waste of great potential for life in everyone.Question 3. Poet v Speaker: The speaker in "Incident" is a little black boy, recalling a childhood memory, telling it from a child's point of view, with simplicity. The poet was taken to live in Baltimore as a child, so his adult voice recalls the event in the present.

In "Those Winter Sundays" the speaker is a grown man, reminiscing on his childhood. He takes us back to memories of his father, expresses the emotions felt then and brings us to the present as an adult. Hayden lived in a situation where his father and mother fought and he was beaten, so he too is the speaker.Theme: The theme of "Incident" is racism, stretching across the years from 1925 Baltimore to the time the poem was written. There is disillusionment and irony too, for at the end, although it is all he can remember, there is something there of having overcome the experience.

"Those Winter Sundays" is on the theme of family, and father/son relationships in particular. The speaker/poet looks back at how his father cared for his family, on his one day of rest and how this went unappreciated.Tone: "Incident", despite the simple childish rhyme, is ironic and the beginning and end of the poem add to this. It begins with "glee", then the "Baltimorean" reacting with childish and adult prejudiced response, dispels that joy, and the ending that tells how this has had a lasting impact, "but hey, I am still here to tell the tale" almost, is the ironic twist in the stark racist reality.

Hayden's tone is one of regret for failing to understand or appreciate his father's love. He talked about "speaking indifferently to him", but there are signs of danger too, "fearing the chronic waves of the anger of that house." The regret is expressed in the final two lines, about "love's austere and lonely offices."

Read More
Cite this document
  • APA
  • MLA
  • CHICAGO
(Harlem by Langston Hughes: Meditation or Threat Essay, n.d.)
Harlem by Langston Hughes: Meditation or Threat Essay. Retrieved from https://studentshare.org/literature/1516171-english-102-college-poetry-assignment
(Harlem by Langston Hughes: Meditation or Threat Essay)
Harlem by Langston Hughes: Meditation or Threat Essay. https://studentshare.org/literature/1516171-english-102-college-poetry-assignment.
“Harlem by Langston Hughes: Meditation or Threat Essay”. https://studentshare.org/literature/1516171-english-102-college-poetry-assignment.
  • Cited: 0 times

CHECK THESE SAMPLES OF Harlem by Langston Hughes: Meditation or Threat

Langston Hughes Negro

This essay is a comparison between two relatively contemporary poems, The Negro Speaks of the River by langston hughes and The Secretary Chant by Marge Piercy.... hellip; The poem by langston hughes is in homage to the depth and strength of the soul of the black people.... langston hughes wrote the poem when he was only 17 and dedicated it to W.... hughes mentions them in order of their relevance to the black history.... Piercy's poem matches the theme of hughes's poem in that both have made poetry a source of venting out their anguish and sorrow on the status quo of oppression that their own kind were facing at the time when they wrote these poems....
3 Pages (750 words) Essay

Langston Hughes Harlem: A Dream Deferred

langston hughes was a Harlem Renaissance poet whose writing mainly portrayed the conditions of African Americans.... langston hughes "Harlem: A Dream Deferred" In his poem, “Harlem: A Deferred Dream,” Hughes foregrounds the frustration of African Americans whose unfulfilled goals and expectations expose them to a serious destruction.... hellip; hughes foregrounds the destructive effects of postponing the dreams of black people and makes the reader feel the impact throughout the whole poem....
3 Pages (750 words) Essay

The Role of African-American Literature in the 1920s

In an era known as the harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, African-American literature has made black identity a “counterforce to the rationality and sterility of the capitalist modernity” (Glick 417).... Although white Americans viewed the emergence of the black culture as “sexualized exoticism packaged and sold as blackness” as shown by the excesses brought about by interracial parties of harlem jazz musicians, it is definitely different when it comes to African-American literature (418)....
4 Pages (1000 words) Essay

Langston Hughes Life

Name Institution Course Date langston hughes langston hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri in the year 1902.... Until the age of thirteen, hughes lived with his grandmother but later on went to live with his mother in Lincoln, Illinois, where he began he started poetry writing.... Eventually the family decided to move and settle at Cleveland, Ohio and hughes joined high school.... In 1920 hughes went back to his father with hopes that he would help him enroll to Colombia University....
5 Pages (1250 words) Essay

Analysis of the Causes and Treatment of Parkinsons Disease in a Patient

PD itself does not pose immediate threat to an individual.... This essay is a summary report following a research conducted about Parkinson's disease.... It is divided into various sub sections to allow a detailed discussion.... The first section defines what Parkinson's disease is, when it was first discovered, who had it first and whether it is a disease of both sexes....
11 Pages (2750 words) Essay

Langston Hughes' Poem

hellip; Over time, this discourse of spatial signing has evolved into a literary strategy of allusion to a diversity of symbolic and spiritual spaces in the figurative practice of black writers. Allusions to the Old Testament iconography of place by which enslaved blacks identified themselves with the enslaved Israelites in Egypt and Babylon in the geography of their song reverberate distinctively in "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," the debut poem young langston hughes scribbled on an envelope as the train taking him to another summer in Mexico with his father crossed the Mississippi....
2 Pages (500 words) Essay

Salvation Story Written by Langston Hughes

The paper "Salvation Story Written by langston hughes" highlights that some people believe that “Salvation” was written as a part of Langston Hughes' autobiography “The Big Sea” (Carrillo).... nbsp;… Generally, langston hughes style of narrating his memory about the events at church allows the reader to relate to his story and evaluate the writer accordingly.... It feels as though “Salvation” is a window to langston hughes' life through which he let the readers learn from and intrude upon his youth....
1 Pages (250 words) Book Report/Review

Explication of Langston Hughes Poetry

This assignment will look into langston hughes's poetry for explicating it.... Additionally, the assignment briefly summarizes the biography of langston hughes.... hellip; langston hughes emerged with the Harlem Renaissance and served as one of its more prominent members.... hughes's poetry will be explored largely in the context of his own life experiences shaping the words and themes of his poetical works.... As a gifted person, hughes was able to contribute to poetry, novels, plays, music, social causes and the evolving movement for African American civil rights....
6 Pages (1500 words) Assignment
sponsored ads
We use cookies to create the best experience for you. Keep on browsing if you are OK with that, or find out how to manage cookies.
Contact Us