Between the World and Me

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1935

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Symbols & Motifs

Bones and Skull

In literature, a symbol is a word or phrase that refers to a literal object which also has a meaning that extends beyond itself. In this poem, the “white bones” (Line 4) (also “dry bones” [Lines 14, 25]) and the “stony skull” (Lines 10, 25) serve as symbols. They are the most visually arresting elements of the scene the speaker stumbles upon. When the bones are first mentioned they are simply objects that lie in the clearing in the wood, but as the picture builds up, and by the time the “stony skull” (Line 10) is mentioned, it has become clear what they represent. They are both the actual remains of a human body and also symbolic of a great wrong done to an individual. They symbolize not only pain, agony, death, cruelty, and gross injustice but also a social system of segregation, racial control, and violence that permitted and encouraged such things to happen. It is appropriate, then, given the weight attached to these symbols, that the poem ends with them both, the “dry bones” and “stony skull staring in yellow surprise at the sun” (Line 25).

Mercy and Baptism

As he nears the end of his vicarious experience of being lynched, the speaker states:

Then my blood was cooled mercifully, cooled by a baptism of gasoline.

And in a blaze of red I leaped to the sky as pain rose like water, boiling my limbs.

Panting, begging I clutched childlike, clutched to the hot sides of death

(Lines 22-24).

There is much here that is deeply ironic; for example, the notion that it was “merciful” for the man’s blood to be cooled by a “baptism” of gasoline, after which he is set on fire. Yet the word “baptism” also has a symbolic meaning that undercuts the irony. He is indeed undergoing a baptism of fire, because he is experiencing, in effect at first hand, a vital, albeit terrifying, truth about the society in which he lives—of how Black people are vulnerable to extreme mob violence at the hands of whites. The speaker is reenacting a death, but in that death lies also a kind of rebirth into a new and necessary awareness and knowledge. Seen in this light, the “blaze of red” in which he “leaps to the sky” (which invites a metaphoric interpretation, since he is tied to a sapling so presumably cannot move) can be seen as some kind of symbolic glorious ascension to heaven, his death agony notwithstanding. The “baptism” is thus an ordeal that initiates him into a level of truth than he was unaware of previously—or at least unaware of the full horror of it. Although none of this is stated explicitly and may not have been at the surface of the poet’s mind, the language is telling nonetheless.