Rosa Parks

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2002

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form and Meter

“Rosa Parks” is a free verse poem, meaning it doesn’t follow a fixed rhyme-scheme or a fixed metrical pattern. Just because the poem is free verse, however, does not mean it is formless. To the contrary, there are two important formal features that organize and propel the poem: a repeating refrain and heavy use of enjambment. This form is appropriate to a poem about the civil rights movement, which wasn’t as formally or rigidly structured as a government bureaucracy. Though it was powerful, it was a looser, more tensile network. In coordination, Giovanni’s poem is not as rigid as a sonnet, but is instead propelled by more flexible literary devices.

Refrain

A refrain is a phrase that repeats serially in a poem or song—most often, the repeated occurrences are identical, but sometimes refrains can shift slightly. As discussed in the “Analysis” section, “Rosa Parks” is organized by the repeating refrain, “This is for the Pullman Porters who”—a phrase that has the feel of a celebratory toast, offering the poem as a thank-you gift to those it’s praising.

About two-thirds of the way through the poem, the refrain stops focusing on the Pullman porters and instead highlights others involved in the civil rights movement, particularly Parks: “And this is for all the mothers who cried” (Lines 37), “And this is / for all the people who said Never Again” (Lines 37-38), “And this is about Rosa Parks whose . . . ” (Lines 38-39), “This is about Mrs. Rosa Parks” (Lines 41), and “This is about the moment Rosa Parks” (Lines 42-43). Despite the names and phrasing changing the essence of the refrain still rings in the words “This is.”

Enjambment

In poetry, the literary device enjambment is when a sentence or phrase runs over one line and onto the next without end-line punctuation. The opposite of enjambment is an end-stopped line where the line is a complete unit, ends with terminal punctuation, and doesn’t spill over onto the next line. For instance, the opening of “Rosa Parks” is enjambed:

This is for the Pullman Porters who organized when people said

they couldn’t (Lines 1-2).

At the end of the first line, readers wonder what people said, so they quickly move on to the next line for the answer. More than three-quarters of the poem is enjambed in this way; moreover, many of those lines are enjambed in the middle of proper nouns. Line 2, for example, breaks a proper noun, the name of a newspaper: “And carried the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago / Defender” (Lines 2-3). Some lines carry the enjambment even further, breaking in the middle of a word by splitting it across two lines: " when the Supreme Court announced its 9-0 decision that “sepa- / rate is inherently unequal” (Lines 15-16).

In fact, only 12 lines in this 57-line poem are not enjambed. Giovanni’s heavy use of enjambment gives “Rosa Parks” a feeling of constant motion, like riding a train.