ENGLISH 213—JUNIOR ENGLISH
Toni Morrison’s
Song of Solomon
Name:
Directions: Using your “Explicating a Poem” handout from the beginning of the year, mark up and
make comments on the following two poems.
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For the “Initial Experience,” comment on your first reaction, literal level, setting, speaker;
for “Techniques,” note any significant poetic devices present.
And for the “Culminating Experience,” make notes of tone, mood, and the poems overall meaning.
Mississippi—1955
(To the Memory of Emmett Till)
Langston Hughes (1955)
Oh what sorrow!
Oh, what pity!
Oh, what pain
That tears and blood
Should mix like rain
And terror come again
To Mississippi.
Come again?
Where has terror been?
On vacation? Up North?
In some other section
Of the nation.
Lying low, unpublicized?
Masked—with only
Jaundiced eyes
Showing through the mask?
Oh, what sorrow,
Pity, pain,
That tears and blood
Should mix like rain
In Mississippi!
And terror, fetid hot,
Yet clammy cold
Remain.
[For the following poem, be ready to explore its connection to Song of Solomon.]
Those Winter Sundays
by Robert Hayden (1913-1980)
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
1966