Between the World and Me

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1935

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form and Meter

The poem is in free verse, which means that it has no regular meter and does not employ rhyme. The lines are exceptionally long; all but one of them stretch over more than one typographical line, sometimes taking up three or four such lines. Wright would have been aware of the long poetic line from the poetry of Walt Whitman and American poet Carl Sandburg (1878-1967), in a poem such as “Chicago” (1916) and many others. Because the lines are so long, they are end-stopped, which means that the end of the line coincides with the end of a grammatical unit, either sentence or clause.

Alliteration

Alliteration is the repetition of initial consonants in nearby letters. It is the most noticeable literary device used in the poem. For example, “stony skull” (Line 10), is repeated and amplified in the final line to “stony skull staring” (Line 25). This amplification draws attention to the speaker seeing his own face “staring” (Line 10) out from the sockets of the skull.

Other examples include “stumbled suddenly” (Line 1), “torn tree” (Line 6), “black blood” (Line 7), “ground gripped” (Line 12), “hungry […] hounds” (Line 13), and “formed flesh” (Line 15).

Anaphora

Anaphora is a literary device in which a word or a phrase at the beginning of a line is repeated at the beginning of the next line and sometimes also of subsequent lines. In this poem, anaphora is used to pile detail up upon detail to increase the horror of the scene the speaker observes. Many of the lines begin with the coordinating conjunction “and”: “And one morning” (Line 1), “And the sooty details” (Line 3). Thereafter, Lines 8, 10, 11, 17, 18, 20, 21, and 23 all begin with “and” as the details unfold relentlessly. Anaphora is also present in Lines 4, 5, and 6, which begin either with “There was” (Lines 4, 5) or “There were” (Line 6). The same effect of building up details is evident in the five successive lines (Lines 12-16) that begin with the definite article “[t]he.” Indeed, Line 13, which has multiple clauses divided by semi-colons, has the same grammatical construction three times: “The sun died in the sky; […] the woods poured forth […]; the darkness screamed,” which builds up the effect of horror as one thing follows another.

Personification

Personification is a figure of speech in which an inanimate thing or abstraction is described as if it had human attributes. For example, the oak and elm trees “guarded” (Line 2) the clearing where the lynching took place. This ascribes purpose to the trees. In similar fashion, when the speaker claims the “charred stump of a sapling” points “a blunt finger accusingly at the sky” (Line 5), this ascribes a finger to a young tree and also a human attitude of pointing out something illegal or wrong. “The sun died” and “a night wind muttered” (Line 13) personify the sun and wind, respectively. The remains of the dead man are also personified, as if he is still alive. The bones are “slumbering” like a living person, and the sun’s rays that enter the eye sockets bestow on the skull a look of “surprise” (Line 10).