Month: September 2025

Bismillah is my first memory.

I became a bird in the Qur’an

at hardly eight years old.

I opened the dark green cover

and revealed the slippery

two hearts: Arabic

and its English translation.

On Saturdays, I learned to repeat

passages in Arabic,

to recite the Qur’an

in its truest language—

otherwise are the locusts

really locusts?

I read and read, and yet

I struggled to recite in Arabic.

This was not a problem

with my memory.

I learned in a week how

to recite the first verse in English.

Sometimes I think every Qur’an

has a dark green cover.

Sometimes I think I still

become a bird

when, in my mind, I remember

Bismillah, ar-Rahman, ar-Rahim.

This must be the reason I

​continue to love.

On my tongue, there is

a short-horned grasshopper.

Bismillah, I reach for you again.

🌿 Theme 1: Memory and Origins: “On My Tongue” by Alycia Pirmohamed begins with the evocative recollection, “Bismillah is my first memory.” This opening situates the poem within the realm of origins, both personal and spiritual. The poet anchors her earliest consciousness not in a material object or domestic scene but in the sacred invocation, Bismillah. This moment of remembrance is more than autobiographical—it is archetypal, linking her identity to a language of divine beginnings. The Qur’an becomes a repository of memory as well, with its “dark green cover” symbolizing continuity across time and place. Thus, the theme of memory in Pirmohamed’s poem underscores how spiritual utterances shape identity, binding childhood impressions to eternal meanings.

📖 Theme 2: Language and Translation: “On My Tongue” by Alycia Pirmohamed foregrounds the duality of expression through the “two hearts: Arabic / and its English translation.” The poet confronts the struggle between authentic recitation and the limitations of translation. She questions whether without Arabic, “are the locusts really locusts?”—a line that highlights the precarious transformation of meaning when sacred text is rendered into another language. The poem thus dramatizes the tension between memory and articulation, the original and the translated. By acknowledging her difficulty—“I struggled to recite in Arabic”—the poet emphasizes how diasporic identity often negotiates between inherited tongues and adopted linguistic realities, revealing the fragility and necessity of both.

🕊️ Theme 3: Faith and Spiritual Transformation: “On My Tongue” by Alycia Pirmohamed presents faith as both struggle and transcendence. The speaker recalls becoming “a bird in the Qur’an / at hardly eight years old,” a metaphor of transformation that suggests flight, purity, and spiritual ascent. The act of reciting—even imperfectly—becomes a way of embodying sacred language. The repeated invocation of Bismillah ties faith not merely to ritual, but to love and endurance: “This must be the reason I / continue to love.” Through this intertwining of divine remembrance and personal emotion, the poem illuminates faith as a lived experience that shapes identity and sustains inner growth, even in the midst of linguistic difficulty.

🍃 Theme 4: Diaspora, Identity, and Continuity: “On My Tongue” by Alycia Pirmohamed also speaks to the diasporic condition—the negotiation between heritage and present identity. The poet imagines that “every Qur’an / has a dark green cover,” a projection that reflects both a longing for universality and an acknowledgment of displacement. Her inability to fully master Arabic does not sever her from her roots; instead, it transforms her connection into metaphor and memory. The grasshopper “on my tongue” at the poem’s close becomes an image of persistence, survival, and the ongoing attempt to bridge gaps between languages and worlds. The title itself, On My Tongue, signals this tension—language as both burden and blessing, a site where identity is continuously re-forged in diaspora.

🌿 Question 1: How does “On My Tongue” by Alycia Pirmohamed explore the tension between language, memory, and faith?

“On My Tongue” by Alycia Pirmohamed situates language at the heart of religious and cultural memory. The poem illustrates how faith is preserved not only through belief but also through the act of recitation. The speaker struggles with Arabic—the sacred language of the Qur’an—yet finds fluency in English, exposing a tension between inherited faith and personal linguistic capacity. Memory plays a crucial role: the first word, Bismillah, becomes a lifelong anchor, showing how sound and word transcend language barriers. This duality highlights the immigrant and diasporic experience, where sacred traditions must be navigated through translation. The poem acknowledges the difficulty of embodying faith across languages, yet insists that the divine essence can still dwell “on my tongue.” Thus, Pirmohamed presents language as both a bridge and a barrier, where memory of faith transforms imperfection into enduring spirituality.

✨ Question 2: What role does imagery of birds and insects play in “On My Tongue” by Alycia Pirmohamed?

“On My Tongue” by Alycia Pirmohamed uses the recurring bird and insect imagery to represent transformation, struggle, and the imperfect beauty of faith. The metaphor of becoming a bird in the Qur’an symbolizes spiritual ascent, purity, and the imaginative power of childhood learning. It reflects the speaker’s innocence and the liberating potential of sacred recitation. Later, the short-horned grasshopper represents difficulty and imperfection—the awkward, stumbling tongue that cannot fully master Arabic pronunciation. The contrast between bird and insect highlights the duality of aspiration versus reality: faith elevates, but human limitation constrains. This imagery also reinforces the natural world as a spiritual metaphor, echoing Islamic symbolism where creatures often embody divine order. By ending with the grasshopper, Pirmohamed underscores that faith is not about flawless recitation but about persistence and devotion. These images ultimately dramatize the embodied, fragile, yet deeply authentic nature of belief.

📖 Question 3: How does “On My Tongue” by Alycia Pirmohamed reflect the diasporic Muslim experience?

“On My Tongue” by Alycia Pirmohamed reflects the challenges of practicing faith within a diasporic context, where language and cultural distance complicate spiritual traditions. The speaker learns to recite Arabic passages every Saturday, suggesting formal religious education within a Western setting. The Qur’an’s “two hearts”—Arabic and English—symbolize the split identity of diasporic Muslims who balance ancestral language with the dominant tongue of their adopted homeland. The struggle to recite Arabic faithfully underscores the feeling of partial belonging: connected to tradition but distanced from fluency. Yet the poem avoids despair. Instead, it emphasizes persistence and love, showing that devotion transcends perfect pronunciation. The diasporic believer, though imperfect in linguistic mastery, remains spiritually whole. By weaving in both childhood memory and adult reflection, Pirmohamed captures the continuity of faith across time and space, embodying how Muslim identity survives translation and thrives in hybrid cultural forms.

🐦 Question 4: Why does “On My Tongue” by Alycia Pirmohamed begin and end with “Bismillah,” and what is its significance?

“On My Tongue” by Alycia Pirmohamed frames the entire poem with Bismillah, the Arabic phrase meaning “In the name of God, the Most Merciful, the Most Compassionate.” Beginning with this memory and ending with its repetition emphasizes the centrality of divine invocation in the speaker’s life. The cyclical structure suggests that faith is not linear but recurring, continually renewed through memory and utterance. Even when language falters, returning to Bismillah affirms devotion and spiritual resilience. The phrase operates as both anchor and refuge, allowing the speaker to connect to God despite linguistic limitations. By closing with “I reach for you again,” Pirmohamed underscores faith as a continuous striving—never complete, always in process. Thus, the repetition of Bismillah becomes not just ritual but resistance against forgetting, a sacred rhythm that sustains identity across cultural and linguistic disjunctions, embodying both struggle and love.

• “Arabic” by Naomi Shihab Nye 🗣️
  • Similarity: It explores the spiritual power and emotional intimacy achieved only through accessing the Arabic language.

• “If They Come for Us” (The title poem) by Fatimah Asghar 🕌
  • Similarity: The poem grapples with the fragmented self resulting from navigating Muslim faith and identity across two cultures.

• “Immigrant Blues” by Li-Young Lee 🍎
  • Similarity: It addresses the sense of displacement and the loss of linguistic rootedness when identity is split between homelands.

📚 Books

1. Pirmohamed, Alycia. Another Way to Split Water. Polygon, 2022.
2. Pirmohamed, Alycia. The Ghosts That Visit Us as We Dream: Figurative Homelands: Second-generation Immigrant Experiences in North American Contemporary Poetry. PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2020.

📖 Academic Articles / Chapters

3. Pirmohamed, Alycia, and Jennifer Cooke. “On the Creation of New Ecological Writing.” On the Creation of New Ecological Writing, Taylor & Francis, 2024. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003399575-6/creation-new-ecological-writing-alycia-pirmohamed-jennifer-cooke
4. “Review Round-up: The Body of Language.” Poetry School, 2022. https://poetryschool.com/theblog/review-round-up-new-poetry-collections-pirmohamed-gao-kinshasa/

✒️ Poems (Websites)

5. Pirmohamed, Alycia. “On My Tongue.” Poetry In Voice / Les voix de la poésie. https://poetryinvoice.ca/read/poems/my-tongue
6. Pirmohamed, Alycia. “Two Poems.” Granta, 2021. https://granta.com/two-poems-alycia-pirmohamed/

               Celestino ran from below with gun   

               and lantern and I saw, before the cane-

               knife’s wounding flash, Cinquez,

               that surly brute who calls himself a prince,   

               directing, urging on the ghastly work.

               He hacked the poor mulatto down, and then   

               he turned on me. The decks were slippery

               when daylight finally came. It sickens me   

               to think of what I saw, of how these apes   

               threw overboard the butchered bodies of

               our men, true Christians all, like so much jetsam.   

               Enough, enough. The rest is quickly told:   

               Cinquez was forced to spare the two of us   

               you see to steer the ship to Africa,   

               and we like phantoms doomed to rove the sea   

               voyaged east by day and west by night,   

               deceiving them, hoping for rescue,   

               prisoners on our own vessel, till   

               at length we drifted to the shores of this   

               your land, America, where we were freed   

               from our unspeakable misery. Now we   

               demand, good sirs, the extradition of   

               Cinquez and his accomplices to La   

               Havana. And it distresses us to know   

               there are so many here who seem inclined   

               to justify the mutiny of these blacks.   

               We find it paradoxical indeed

               that you whose wealth, whose tree of liberty   

               are rooted in the labor of your slaves

               should suffer the august John Quincy Adams   

               to speak with so much passion of the right   

               of chattel slaves to kill their lawful masters   

               and with his Roman rhetoric weave a hero’s   

               garland for Cinquez. I tell you that   

               we are determined to return to Cuba

               with our slaves and there see justice done. Cinquez—

               or let us say ‘the Prince’—Cinquez shall die.”

       The deep immortal human wish,   

       the timeless will:

               Cinquez its deathless primaveral image,   

               life that transfigures many lives.

       Voyage through death

                                     to life upon these shores.

1. How does Robert Hayden’s use of multiple voices in “Middle Passage” complicate the telling of history?
In “Middle Passage” by Robert Hayden, the shifting collage of ship logs, testimonies, and hymnal fragments destabilizes any single narrative of the slave trade. Instead of presenting a monologic history, Hayden allows the poem to speak in many registers: the captain’s diary confesses fear—“8 bells. I cannot sleep, for I am sick with fear”—while legal depositions reduce horror to formulaic language, “Further deponent sayeth not.” This polyphony dramatizes how history is fragmented, distorted, and mediated by the oppressors’ words. Yet through repetition and refrain—“voyage through death / to life upon these shores”—the voices cohere into a tragic chorus, exposing the shared nightmare of human dehumanization. By staging history as a cacophony, Hayden forces readers to wrestle with how truth emerges from contested voices. He does not allow history to be received passively; it must be heard as indictment, lament, and, paradoxically, prophecy of survival.

2. In what ways does “Middle Passage” expose the hypocrisy of religion during the slave trade?
In “Middle Passage” by Robert Hayden, Christianity is exposed as a mask concealing atrocity. The crews pray, “Jesus Saviour Pilot Me / Over Life’s Tempestuous Sea,” invoking divine protection even as Africans are shackled below in suffocating holds. The irony is merciless: the same God appealed to for safe voyages is the God whose supposed will justifies enslavement. Hayden juxtaposes the spiritual with the grotesque: “Deep in the festering hold thy father lies, / of his bones New England pews are made.” Churches literally rise from bones, their altar lights burning with the extinguished eyes of the dead. Religion here becomes complicit, even sanctifying murder in the name of salvation. By interlacing hymn fragments with brutal testimony, Hayden makes visible the blasphemy at the heart of Christian colonialism. His critique is not against faith itself but against its perversion, showing how sacred language becomes hollow when pressed into the service of profit and cruelty.

3. How does Hayden’s imagery in “Middle Passage” render the horror of the slave trade visceral for the reader?
In “Middle Passage” by Robert Hayden, imagery is the poet’s most relentless weapon against historical amnesia. The poem is saturated with grotesque sensory detail: the “charnel stench, effluvium of living death” transforms the slave ship into a floating crypt. Thirst drives captives to “tear their flesh and suck the blood,” an image so horrifying that it collapses metaphor into reality. The blindness spreading across the vessel, “its claws have scratched sight from the Capt.’s eyes,” fuses disease with punishment, echoing Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner. Even the sea itself is transformed, haunted by sharks that follow “the moans the fever and the dying.” Hayden uses imagery to overwhelm, forcing the reader to inhabit the unbearable. This visceral language resists abstraction; it insists that atrocity be confronted in its materiality. In doing so, Hayden ensures that the Middle Passage is not merely remembered as data but experienced as living horror in the imagination.

4. How does Hayden reimagine Cinquez in “Middle Passage” as a mythic figure of resistance?
In “Middle Passage” by Robert Hayden, Cinquez, leader of the Amistad revolt, emerges as more than a historical rebel—he is mythologized into the embodiment of timeless resistance. Survivor testimony paints him as a terrifying adversary, “that surly brute who calls himself a prince,” directing the mutiny “swift as the puma’s leap.” Yet Hayden refuses this demonization. Instead, Cinquez becomes “the deep immortal human wish, / the timeless will,” a symbolic figure whose defiance transcends one moment in history. He is likened to a “primaveral image, / life that transfigures many lives,” transforming atrocity into renewal. By elevating Cinquez beyond the historical archive, Hayden performs what Bloom would call the strong poet’s revisionary act—reshaping the past into myth. Cinquez embodies survival, resistance, and the refusal of annihilation, ensuring that the voyage through death does not end in despair but in the prophetic possibility of freedom upon these shores.

Books

• Bloom, Harold. Robert Hayden. Chelsea House, 1989.
• VanSpanckeren, Kathryn. Robert Hayden: A Critical Analysis of His Poetry. University of Illinois Press, 1981.

Academic Articles

• Hayden, Robert E. “Middle Passage.” Phylon (1940-1956), vol. 6, no. 3, 1945, pp. 247–53. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/272494. Accessed 27 Sept. 2025.
• Fetrow, Fred M. “‘MIDDLE PASSAGE’: ROBERT HAYDEN’S ANTI-EPIC.” CLA Journal, vol. 22, no. 4, 1979, pp. 304–18. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44329417. Accessed 27 Sept. 2025.
• Lambert, Raphaël. “The Slave Trade as Memory and History: James A. Emanuel’s ‘The Middle Passage Blues’ and Robert Hayden’s ‘Middle Passage.’” African American Review, vol. 47, no. 2/3, 2014, pp. 327–38. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24589757. Accessed 27 Sept. 2025.

Poetry Websites

• The Poetry Foundation. “Middle Passage by Robert Hayden.” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43296/middle-passage.
• Poets.org. “Robert Hayden: Middle Passage.” Poets.org, https://poets.org/poem/middle-passage.

Books

1. Asghar, Fatimah. If They Come for Us: Poems. One World / Random House, 2018.
2. Asghar, Fatimah. When We Were Sisters. One World, 2022.

Academic Articles

3. Yunusoğlu, Andrada. “Longing and Belonging in If They Come for Us by Fatimah Asghar and Home Is Not a Country by Safia Elhillo.” SSRN, 31 Dec. 2023. https://ssrn.com/abstract=5148940
4. Tracey, Janey. “Yesterday Is Tomorrow in Fatimah Asghar’s If They Come for Us.” Ploughshares Blog, 18 Dec. 2018. https://pshares.org/blog/yesterday-is-tomorrow-in-fatimah-asghars-if-they-come-for-us/

Poem Websites

5. “If They Come For Us.” Poets.org. https://poets.org/poem/if-they-come-us
6. “If They Come For Us.” Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/147243/if-they-come-for-us

❓1. How does Ross Gay use irony to deepen the tragedy of Eric Garner’s death?

In “A Small Needful Fact” by Ross Gay, irony serves as the poem’s most devastating device. The poet closes with the recognition that Garner’s horticultural work made it “easier / for us to breathe” 🌱, while his own final words were “I can’t breathe” 💔. This cruel reversal highlights not only the injustice of his death but also the bitter paradox that a man who contributed to sustaining life was denied his own. Gay’s gentle diction—“perhaps,” “gently,” “pleasant to touch and smell”—contrasts with the violent suffocation, amplifying the irony. The poem forces readers to confront the grotesque disjunction between Garner’s nurturing legacy and the brutality that ended his life.

❓2. What role does imagery play in transforming Garner from victim to caretaker?

In “A Small Needful Fact” by Ross Gay, imagery is the vehicle by which Garner is remembered not merely as a casualty but as a tender caretaker. Gay describes how Garner’s hands “put gently into the earth / some plants” 🌿, grounding him in the imagery of growth and care. The sensory images—“pleasant to touch and smell” 👃👆—elevate Garner’s humanity, making him part of life’s texture rather than a faceless victim. By invoking plants that “feed small and necessary creatures” 🐦, Gay situates Garner within a sustaining ecological cycle. These images redeem him from reductive headlines and restore him to a human legacy defined by gentleness and continuity.

❓3. How does repetition reinforce the themes of continuity and resilience?

In “A Small Needful Fact” by Ross Gay, repetition becomes a meditative insistence on life’s persistence. The poet repeats phrases such as “in all likelihood” and “continue to grow, continue” 🔁🌱. This rhythm mirrors the cyclical processes of nature itself—growth, nourishment, breath. Each repetition is an assertion that despite Garner’s silenced voice, his actions endure through the plants he tended. The effect is both hypnotic and consoling: it draws attention to the inevitability of growth even in the shadow of tragedy. By repeating these phrases, Gay writes against erasure, suggesting that Garner’s life still resonates through the smallest leaves and breaths.

❓4. How does the poem expand Eric Garner’s legacy beyond his death?

In “A Small Needful Fact” by Ross Gay, the poet transforms Garner’s legacy from one of victimhood into one of life-giving continuity. The simple fact that Garner worked for the Parks and Recreation Horticultural Department 🌳 expands into a meditation on interconnectedness: plants “house and feed small and necessary creatures,” and most powerfully, they produce oxygen, “making it easier / for us to breathe.” 🌬️✨ This reframing elevates Garner into a symbol of nurture and survival. Bloom would call this the tragic sublime—where the smallest acts of planting achieve mythic proportions. Gay refuses to allow Garner’s identity to be collapsed into the moment of his death; instead, he extends it into the living, breathing world, a legacy that endures in the very air we inhale.

📚 Books

1. Gay, Ross. Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015.
2. Gay, Ross. Against Which. Cave Canem Poetry Prize, Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2006.

📖 Academic Articles

• ARDAM, JACQUELYN. “THE INTERNET POEM: To Soothe.” Avidly Reads Poetry, NYU Press, 2022, pp. 113–46. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.4493293.7. Accessed 27 Sept. 2025.

4. Rankine, Claudia. “The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning.” The New York Times Magazine, 22 June 2015.
   https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/22/magazine/the-condition-of-black-life-is-one-of-mourning.html

🌐 Poetry Websites

5. Split This Rock. “A Small Needful Fact by Ross Gay.” The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database. 2015.
   https://www.splitthisrock.org/poetry-database/poem/a-small-needful-fact
6. Poetry Foundation. “Ross Gay.” Poetry Foundation.
   https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/ross-gay

(For Harold Jackman)

What is Africa to me:

Copper sun or scarlet sea,

Jungle star or jungle track,

Strong bronzed men, or regal black

Women from whose loins I sprang

When the birds of Eden sang?

One three centuries removed

From the scenes his fathers loved,

Spicy grove, cinnamon tree,

What is Africa to me? 

So I lie, who all day long

Want no sound except the song

Sung by wild barbaric birds

Goading massive jungle herds,

Juggernauts of flesh that pass

Trampling tall defiant grass

Where young forest lovers lie,

Plighting troth beneath the sky.

So I lie, who always hear,

Though I cram against my ear

Both my thumbs, and keep them there,

Great drums throbbing through the air.

So I lie, whose fount of pride,

Dear distress, and joy allied,

Is my somber flesh and skin,

With the dark blood dammed within

Like great pulsing tides of wine

That, I fear, must burst the fine

Channels of the chafing net

Where they surge and foam and fret.

Africa? A book one thumbs

Listlessly, till slumber comes.

Unremembered are her bats

Circling through the night, her cats

Crouching in the river reeds,

Stalking gentle flesh that feeds

By the river brink; no more

Does the bugle-throated roar

Cry that monarch claws have leapt

From the scabbards where they slept.

Silver snakes that once a year

Doff the lovely coats you wear,

Seek no covert in your fear

Lest a mortal eye should see;

What’s your nakedness to me?

Here no leprous flowers rear

Fierce corollas in the air;

Here no bodies sleek and wet,

Dripping mingled rain and sweat,

Tread the savage measures of

Jungle boys and girls in love.

What is last year’s snow to me,

Last year’s anything? The tree

Budding yearly must forget

How its past arose or set—

Bough and blossom, flower, fruit,

Even what shy bird with mute

Wonder at her travail there,

Meekly labored in its hair.

One three centuries removed

From the scenes his fathers loved,

Spicy grove, cinnamon tree,

What is Africa to me? 

So I lie, who find no peace

Night or day, no slight release

From the unremittant beat

Made by cruel padded feet

Walking through my body’s street.

Up and down they go, and back,

Treading out a jungle track.

So I lie, who never quite

Safely sleep from rain at night—

I can never rest at all

When the rain begins to fall;

Like a soul gone mad with pain

I must match its weird refrain;

Ever must I twist and squirm,

Writhing like a baited worm,

While its primal measures drip

Through my body, crying, “Strip!

Doff this new exuberance.

Come and dance the Lover’s Dance!”

In an old remembered way

Rain works on me night and day.

Quaint, outlandish heathen gods

Black men fashion out of rods,

Clay, and brittle bits of stone,

In a likeness like their own,

My conversion came high-priced;

I belong to Jesus Christ,

Preacher of humility;

Heathen gods are naught to me.

Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,

So I make an idle boast;

Jesus of the twice-turned cheek,

Lamb of God, although I speak

With my mouth thus, in my heart

Do I play a double part.

Ever at Thy glowing altar

Must my heart grow sick and falter,

Wishing He I served were black,

Thinking then it would not lack

Precedent of pain to guide it,

Let who would or might deride it;

Surely then this flesh would know

Yours had borne a kindred woe.

Lord, I fashion dark gods, too,

Daring even to give You

Dark despairing features where,

Crowned with dark rebellious hair,

Patience wavers just so much as

Mortal grief compels, while touches

Quick and hot, of anger, rise

To smitten cheek and weary eyes.

Lord, forgive me if my need

Sometimes shapes a human creed.

All day long and all night through,

One thing only must I do:

Quench my pride and cool my blood,

Lest I perish in the flood.

Lest a hidden ember set

Timber that I thought was wet

Burning like the dryest flax,

Melting like the merest wax,

Lest the grave restore its dead.

Not yet has my heart or head

In the least way realized

They and I are civilized.

🌍 Theme 1: Cultural Identity and Displacement: In “Heritage” by Countee Cullen, the central question—“What is Africa to me?”—echoes the speaker’s painful struggle with his cultural identity. As a Black man born in America, Cullen’s speaker feels emotionally and physically disconnected from the continent of his ancestry. He reflects on Africa in rich imagery—“Copper sun,” “scarlet sea,” “spicy grove, cinnamon tree”—but admits these are not lived experiences. His relationship with Africa is filtered through romanticized imagination and inherited memory. The refrain “One three centuries removed / From the scenes his fathers loved” highlights the temporal and spiritual distance from his roots. The speaker is aware of the ancestral blood that runs through him—“my somber flesh and skin”—yet he cannot fully grasp the land or culture it came from. The poem illustrates the condition of the African diaspora: longing for a homeland that feels mythical, abstract, and irretrievably lost due to history and displacement.

🔥 Theme 2: Inner Conflict Between Christianity and Ancestral Beliefs: In “Heritage” by Countee Cullen, the speaker experiences a deep spiritual conflict between his Christian faith and the ancestral gods of Africa. He acknowledges his religious identity with lines like “I belong to Jesus Christ, / Preacher of humility,” but this declaration is immediately followed by doubt and longing: “Wishing He I served were Black.” The speaker yearns for a deity who reflects his racial identity and suffering. He confesses, “Lord, I fashion dark gods, too,” revealing how his imagination creates a spiritual bridge between African heritage and Christian belief. This internal division is also seen in his ironic assertion that “Heathen gods are naught to me,” even as he crafts emotional and spiritual representations of them. The Christian trinity—“Father, Son, and Holy Ghost”—is juxtaposed with ancient African deities made of “rods, clay, and brittle bits of stone.” Cullen’s speaker is torn between inherited faith and ancestral spirituality, unable to reconcile them.

🌧️ Theme 3: Repressed Emotion and Psychological Turmoil: In “Heritage” by Countee Cullen, emotional repression is depicted as a nearly physical condition. The speaker’s inner turmoil manifests in disturbing bodily images: “So I lie, whose fount of pride, / Dear distress, and joy allied, / Is my somber flesh and skin.” He describes the sensation of drums pounding within him, symbolizing the repressed power of his ancestral memory. The poetic voice is haunted day and night by the rhythm of “cruel padded feet / Walking through my body’s street.” This relentless psychological unrest suggests a kind of postcolonial trauma—ancestral energy and cultural pride that has been suppressed by societal expectations and religious doctrine. The metaphor “Like great pulsing tides of wine” represents the potent, dangerous force of racial identity under pressure. Cullen’s speaker is aware that if he fails to “quench [his] pride and cool [his] blood,” it may consume him, revealing the cost of denying one’s heritage and emotional truth.

🎭 Theme 4: Duality of Pride and Shame in Black Identity: In “Heritage” by Countee Cullen, the speaker wrestles with conflicting emotions—pride in his Black identity and shame instilled by a society that devalues it. He calls his skin a “fount of pride, dear distress,” blending opposing emotions into one complex legacy. There is pride in lineage, in “strong bronzed men” and “regal black women,” yet also shame in the way this identity is treated and suppressed in Western society. The speaker cannot fully embrace his heritage without also confronting societal rejection and internalized inferiority. The poem’s rhythm and repetition reflect his inability to resolve this tension. He imagines “Lamb of God” with “dark rebellious hair,” a vision born of both defiance and pain. The line “Lest the grave restore its dead” warns of a buried identity ready to erupt. Cullen illustrates how Black identity in a colonial world is marked by contradiction—both a source of strength and a site of ongoing psychological struggle.

🌍 1. How does Countee Cullen use nature imagery to express the speaker’s relationship with Africa in “Heritage”?

In “Heritage” by Countee Cullen, nature imagery becomes the foundation for exploring the speaker’s estranged connection to his ancestral homeland. Africa is imagined through lush, sensory language—“Copper sun or scarlet sea, / Jungle star or jungle track”—portraying it as a place of primal beauty and spiritual origin. These natural elements are vibrant, but they are not grounded in personal memory. Instead, they illustrate how the speaker’s view of Africa is filtered through imagination, historical distance, and cultural inheritance. He asks repeatedly, “What is Africa to me?”—suggesting that despite these vivid images, his understanding remains abstract and unresolved. The speaker is “three centuries removed / From the scenes his fathers loved,” highlighting generational disconnection. Nature in the poem functions as both a symbol of Africa’s grandeur and a reminder of the speaker’s alienation from it. Cullen uses this rich imagery to show how identity rooted in a distant homeland can be beautiful yet painfully intangible.

🔥 2. In what ways does the speaker experience a spiritual crisis in “Heritage”?

In “Heritage” by Countee Cullen, the speaker’s spiritual crisis emerges from a clash between his Christian upbringing and his African heritage. He affirms his religious identity—“I belong to Jesus Christ”—yet follows with the line “Wishing He I served were Black,” exposing an inner conflict rooted in racial and spiritual dissonance. Cullen highlights how the speaker struggles to find belonging in a faith tradition historically used to oppress his people. This tension intensifies as he imagines a divine figure with “dark rebellious hair” and “smitten cheek and weary eyes,” reimagining Christ in a racial image that reflects his own experience. The speaker even admits, “Lord, I fashion dark gods, too,” symbolizing a desperate need to reconcile his identity with his faith. His struggle is not just theological but deeply personal—between worship and representation, belief and belonging. Cullen uses this internal rift to expose the psychological cost of being caught between two spiritual worlds.

🌧️ 3. What role does sound—especially the image of drums—play in conveying the speaker’s inner turmoil in “Heritage”?

In “Heritage” by Countee Cullen, sound, particularly the repeated image of drums, becomes a powerful expression of ancestral memory and psychological unrest. The speaker is haunted by “great drums throbbing through the air,” a sound that echoes the cultural rhythms of Africa. This auditory motif represents a past that refuses to be silenced—“Though I cram against my ear / Both my thumbs… So I lie.” The drums are relentless, symbolizing how deeply embedded heritage is in his consciousness. Cullen uses sound as more than background noise—it becomes the poem’s pulse, a reminder of identity that cannot be ignored or repressed. The speaker’s body becomes a vessel for this rhythm—“Walking through my body’s street,”—suggesting that cultural memory is visceral and inescapable. The sound of the drums mirrors the speaker’s internal unrest, linking emotional tension with ancestral calling. Through this, Cullen illustrates how heritage can live on as an unrelenting force within the self.

🕊️ 4. How does Cullen portray the duality of pride and shame in Black identity in “Heritage”?

In “Heritage” by Countee Cullen, the speaker’s portrayal of Black identity reveals an emotional duality—both pride in his cultural roots and shame imposed by societal forces. He refers to his “somber flesh and skin” as a source of “pride, dear distress, and joy allied,” recognizing the complexity of carrying a racial identity shaped by both ancestral strength and historical oppression. He admires his lineage—“Strong bronzed men, or regal black / Women from whose loins I sprang”—yet fears the consequences of embracing it too openly: “Lest a hidden ember set / Timber that I thought was wet.” This metaphor of suppressed fire shows the danger he associates with unrestrained racial pride in a society that demands restraint. Cullen’s speaker is constantly negotiating this balance, trying to “quench [his] pride and cool [his] blood.” The poem powerfully captures how pride in Blackness coexists with internalized fear and generational trauma.

🌸 The Rejection of Historical Burden: The poem “Biracial” by Carolyn Oxley immediately enters into a dialectical struggle against the hereditary yoke of historical precedent. The poet’s hermeneutic is a radical one, positing that the child’s existence is not an emblem of past conflict. It is a striking subversion of the conventional poetic narrative to state, with such declarative force, “You were not a provision of armistice or treaty.” By divorcing the subject from the grand, often tragic, narratives of global friction and the brutal legacies of “slave” ships and colonial exploits, Oxley liberates her child from a predetermined, politically charged existence. This denial of historical patrimony is not a form of amnesia but a powerful aesthetic act of creation, establishing a new, unburdened genesis. The daughter’s body becomes a site of simple, universal truth, unburdened by the weight of inherited trauma.

🌻 The Affirmation of Existential Autonomy: The poem “Biracial” by Carolyn Oxley profoundly articulates a subject’s triumph over imposed collective identity. The daughter is not relegated to a symbolic role, nor is her being a vessel for an entire “nation or diaspora.” Oxley’s poetic voice grants her daughter an existential autonomy that transcends the deterministic forces of lineage and group consciousness. The poem culminates in the apotheosis of personal belonging, declaring “Your homeland is wherever you stand.” This line is not merely a statement of physical presence but a philosophical assertion of self-possession. It is a sublime rejection of external definitions, securing for the individual an aesthetic and spiritual sovereignty over their own identity, independent of any inherited communal narrative that would seek to define her by race, history, or political struggle.

🌹 The Primacy of Affection over Ancestry: The central struggle of “Biracial” by Carolyn Oxley is to establish the aesthetic and moral superiority of private affection over public history. The poet’s exquisite juxtaposition pits the domestic simplicity of “clink of pan / on stove, scraping-back of chair” against the monumental, often violent, historical forces that seek to claim the daughter’s identity. This choice is a lyrical act of rebellion, asserting that the most profound and authentic origin story is not one of “armistice or treaty” but of simple, human love. The poem insists that this intimate genesis is the truest foundation, untainted by the complex and often sordid narratives of “explorer[s]” and “slave[s],” creating a sacred space for the child’s being that exists outside the confines of historical determinism and societal expectations.

🌷 The Subversion of the External Gaze: The poetic project of “Biracial” by Carolyn Oxley is to dismantle the oppressive weight of the external gaze. The opening lines “Some people stare, / searching for a Judas bone,” immediately confront the critical and judgmental eye of a world seeking to find a flaw or a mark of perceived betrayal. However, this gaze is rendered impotent, as it can only apprehend the “usual things” of the body—the “stems of your arms” and the “plunge of femur into socket.” The poem shifts the focus from the scrutinizing stare to the daughter’s own dignified presence. The final image of her spine, “straighter than the fence lines at Gettysburg,” not only rejects the historical narrative of conflict but also represents a defiance of the gaze itself, asserting an unbreakable, personal rectitude that cannot be compromised by external judgment.

1. How does the poem subvert the traditional role of a “historical burden” on identity?

“Biracial” by Carolyn Oxley enters a fierce and necessary dialectic against the deterministic weight of history. The poem’s most profound aesthetic act is its outright repudiation of a past that would seek to define the subject. Oxley refuses to allow her daughter to be a mere symbol or a living document of conflict, declaring with stunning finality, “You were not a provision of armistice or treaty.” This powerful negation transcends the anxieties of inherited historical trauma. The poem’s aesthetic triumph lies in its ability to liberate its subject from a burdened lineage, asserting a fresh and unencumbered origin. The final image of the daughter’s spine “straighter than the fence lines at Gettysburg” is a brilliant rhetorical move, transforming a symbol of historical fracture into one of unbending, personal rectitude that is utterly independent of collective memory and societal expectations.

2. In what way does the poem establish the primacy of love over inherited history?

In “Biracial” by Carolyn Oxley, the poet constructs a profound hierarchy of values, placing the intimate, private act of love above the monumental, often brutal, narratives of history. The poem’s aesthetic power lies in its juxtaposition of the “simple as the sounds at breakfast” with the immense weight of historical crimes. By framing the daughter’s creation not through “slave” ships or the violent incursions of the “explorer,” but through the mundane grace of a home, Oxley posits that the true patrimony is not one of inherited conflict but of personal affection. This is not a denial of history’s reality but a lyrical assertion that the most valid origin story is one of pure, unburdened love, creating a sacred space for the child’s being that is unassailable by the trauma of ancestry.

3. What is the significance of the poem’s focus on the human body’s “usual things”?

The formalist elegance of “Biracial” by Carolyn Oxley resides in its aesthetic focus on the body’s “usual things.” The opening stanza, which dismisses those “searching for a Judas bone,” performs a crucial subversion of the external, judgmental gaze. The poet deliberately grounds the poem in the unexceptional physicality of “the stems of your arms, / the sleek plunge of femur into socket.” This attention to fundamental human anatomy is a powerful refutation of any attempt to exoticize or politicize the biracial body. By insisting on the universality of these bodily forms, the poem asserts an identity that is profoundly human before it is anything else, making its claim for normalcy its most radical and aesthetically compelling statement and demonstrating the subject’s inherent value.

4. How does the poem’s apostrophe to the daughter function as a rhetorical and aesthetic choice?

The sustained apostrophe in “Biracial” by Carolyn Oxley is not merely a rhetorical device but the very engine of the poem’s aesthetic and emotional power. By addressing the work “for my daughter,” Oxley establishes an intimate, conversational tone that bypasses external judgment and creates a private, protected sphere for the subject. This direct address allows the poet to perform a series of profound negations and affirmations, declaring “You were not… ” and “Your homeland is wherever / you stand” as if speaking a sacred, personal truth. The apostrophe transforms the poem into a protective utterance, a lyrical shield against the societal gaze. It is a canonical example of a poet using form to create an inviolable, self-contained world for their subject, demonstrating the ultimate authority of the poetic voice.

📚 Books

• Oxley, Carolyn. What is a Woman. Finishing Line Press, 2008.
• Spickard, Paul R. Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth-Century America. University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.

📄 Academic Articles

• Rockquemore, Kerry Ann, and David L. Brunsma. “Socially Embedded Identities: Theories, Typologies, and Processes of Racial Identity among Black/White Biracials.” The Sociological Quarterly, vol. 43, no. 2, 2002, pp. 335–356. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1533-8525.2002.tb00052.x
• Rockquemore, Kerry Ann, and David L. Brunsma. “Racing to Theory or Retheorizing Race? Understanding the Struggle to Build a Multiracial Identity Theory.” Journal of Social Issues, vol. 65, no. 1, 2009, pp. 13–34. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4560.2008.01585.x
• Rockquemore, Kerry Ann. “Opting for White: Choice, Fluidity, and Racial Identity.” Sociological Inquiry, vol. 72, no. 3, 2002, pp. 408–432. https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-682X.00025
• Brunsma, David L. “The New Color Complex: Appearances and Biracial Identity.” Identity: An International Journal of Theory and Research, vol. 1, no. 3, 2001, pp. 225–246. https://doi.org/10.1207/S1532706XID0103_03

🌐 Poem Websites

• Poetry Foundation. poetryfoundation.org. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/
• Poets.org. poets.org. https://poets.org/

I am a child of the Americas,

a light-skinned mestiza of the Caribbean,

a child of many diaspora, born into this continent at a crossroads.

I am a U.S. Puerto Rican Jew,

a product of the ghettos of a New York I have never known.

An immigrant and the daughter and granddaughter of immigrants.

I speak English with passion: it’s the tongue of my consciousness,

a flashing knife blade of crystal, my tool, my craft.

I am Caribeña, island grown. Spanish is in my flesh,

Ripples from my tongue, lodge in my hips:

the language of garlic and mangoes,

the singing of poetry, the flying gestures of my hands.

I am of Latinoamerica, rooted in the history of my continent:

I speak from that body.

I am not African.

Africa is in me, but I cannot return.

I am not taína.

Taíno is in me, but there is no way back.

I am not European.

Europe lives in me, but I have no home there.

I am new. History made me. My first language was spanglish.

I was born at the crossroads

and I am whole.

(1986)

1. The Complexities of Identity

“Child of the Americas” by Aurora Levins Morales explores the intricate and multifaceted nature of identity, portraying it not as a singular, fixed concept but as a blend of various cultures, histories, and languages. The poem’s title itself, “Child of the Americas,” immediately establishes a broad, continental identity that transcends national borders. Morales refers to herself as a “light-skinned mestiza of the Caribbean,” highlighting her mixed heritage and the historical intersections that shaped her. She further complicates this by identifying as a “U.S. Puerto Rican Jew,” showcasing the diaspora she is a product of—the “ghettos of a New York I have never known” and her family’s immigrant past. Her identity is a composite of these elements, a dynamic and evolving self that is “new,” forged by a history that “made me.” She confidently asserts her wholeness despite being born “at a crossroads,” suggesting that her identity is complete precisely because of its diverse and intersecting parts.

2. Language as a Tool of Identity

“Child of the Americas” by Aurora Levins Morales powerfully portrays language as more than just a means of communication; it’s a fundamental aspect of identity and self-expression. The poet’s relationship with English is described as a passionate and deliberate choice—”it’s the tongue of my consciousness, a flashing knife blade of crystal, my tool, my craft.” This vivid imagery shows English as a sharp, precise instrument she uses to shape her thoughts and creativity. In contrast, Spanish is an inherent, physical part of her. She says, “Spanish is in my flesh,” and it “lodges in my hips,” using sensory language to describe a deep, visceral connection to her Caribbean roots. Spanish is the “language of garlic and mangoes” and the “flying gestures of my hands,” representing a cultural and embodied knowledge that is distinct from her intellectual use of English. The final line, “My first language was spanglish,” unifies these two linguistic worlds, confirming that her identity is not about choosing one language over the other but embracing the unique hybrid that reflects her lived experience.

3. The Sense of Not Belonging and Finding Wholeness

A central theme in “Child of the Americas” by Aurora Levins Morales is the feeling of not fully belonging to any single place, culture, or heritage. The poem’s third stanza is a poignant litany of this displacement: “I am not African… I cannot return,” “I am not taína… there is no way back,” and “I am not European… I have no home there.” Morales acknowledges that each of these ancestral threads—Africa, the indigenous Taíno people, and Europe—is “in me” or “lives in me,” but she feels an insurmountable distance from their origins. This sense of being a product of many places yet belonging to none is a common immigrant experience. However, the poem takes a powerful turn in its conclusion. Despite this feeling of being at a crossroads, she asserts, “and I am whole.” This statement redefines what it means to belong. Instead of finding wholeness by returning to a single origin, she finds it in the very fact of her blended, diasporic identity. Her wholeness is not a lack of fragmentation but a confident acceptance of her unique and complex self.

4. The Impact of Diaspora and History

“Child of the Americas” by Aurora Levins Morales is a testament to the profound and lasting impact of diaspora and history on personal identity. The poem’s title and opening lines immediately place the speaker as “a child of many diaspora,” recognizing her identity as a direct result of historical movements and migrations. The poet is a “product of the ghettos of a New York I have never known,” connecting her present to the struggles and experiences of previous generations of immigrants. She is “rooted in the history of my continent” and speaks “from that body,” indicating that her physical and spiritual self is inextricably linked to the historical landscape of the Americas. The poem highlights that identity is not just a personal matter but a collective one shaped by global forces. Morales’s identity is not self-created but is “new” and “made” by the histories of forced migration, colonization, and cultural blending that have defined the Americas. Her final declaration of being “whole” despite this historical weight is a powerful assertion of resilience and self-acceptance.

🌍 Question 1: How does “Child of the Americas” by Aurora Levins Morales redefine the meaning of “American” identity?
Answer: In “Child of the Americas” by Aurora Levins Morales, American identity is redefined as plural, layered, and born of multiple diasporas rather than singular or uniform. Morales identifies herself as “a light-skinned mestiza of the Caribbean” and “a U.S. Puerto Rican Jew,” showing that her American identity is not rooted in one tradition but in the intersection of many. By declaring, “I was born at the crossroads / and I am whole,” she reframes hybridity as a source of wholeness rather than fragmentation. Her insistence that her “first language was spanglish” further resists assimilationist notions of what it means to be American, celebrating linguistic mixture as a marker of belonging. Thus, Morales redefines being American as embracing multiplicity, showing that hybridity is the authentic fabric of the Americas.

✨ Question 2: In what ways does “Child of the Americas” by Aurora Levins Morales present language as both a tool of survival and a marker of cultural identity?
Answer: In “Child of the Americas” by Aurora Levins Morales, language embodies both survival in America and cultural inheritance. English is described as “the tongue of my consciousness, / a flashing knife blade of crystal, my tool, my craft,” which frames it as precise, empowering, and necessary for her intellectual expression and survival in a U.S. context. In contrast, Spanish is portrayed as visceral and embodied: “Spanish is in my flesh… lodge in my hips,” tied to food, music, and gesture, such as “garlic and mangoes” and “the singing of poetry.” This contrast reveals English as instrumental and rational while Spanish functions as cultural memory and emotional connection. Her embrace of Spanglish—the fusion of both—demonstrates language as a marker of hybridity, where survival and identity merge. Morales shows that bilingualism is not conflict but strength, allowing her to claim belonging in both cultural worlds.

🔥 Question 3: How does “Child of the Americas” by Aurora Levins Morales explore historical displacement and the impossibility of return?
Answer: In “Child of the Americas” by Aurora Levins Morales, the theme of displacement is central to her identity, as she acknowledges the presence of ancestral legacies while recognizing the impossibility of returning to them. The stanza “I am not African. / Africa is in me, but I cannot return. / I am not taína… / I am not European” highlights how history, colonization, and slavery have fractured direct connections to origins. These repetitions stress that while her body carries traces of Africa, Taíno, and Europe, she cannot reclaim them as homelands. Instead, identity emerges in the present, forged out of memory and displacement. By rejecting the idea of “return,” Morales reframes the diasporic experience: identity is not about recovering a lost past but about embracing a new cultural self born of survival, migration, and history.

🌸 Question 4: How does the affirmation of wholeness in “Child of the Americas” by Aurora Levins Morales reshape narratives of fragmented identity?
Answer: In “Child of the Americas” by Aurora Levins Morales, the closing affirmation “I am whole” directly challenges narratives that view mixed or diasporic identities as incomplete. After tracing her roots across Africa, Europe, Taíno heritage, Puerto Rico, and Jewish diaspora, Morales concludes not with loss but with empowerment: “I am new. History made me. My first language was spanglish. / I was born at the crossroads / and I am whole.” The “crossroads” symbolizes both struggle and creation, and by embracing it, she transforms fragmentation into unity. Her declaration reshapes identity by refusing the assimilationist demand to erase difference in order to belong. Instead, she asserts that wholeness arises precisely from multiplicity and historical complexity. Thus, Morales reclaims hybridity as a powerful, self-affirming identity, rejecting deficit models of cultural mixing.

Books

1. Morales, Aurora Levins, and Rosario Morales. Getting Home Alive. Firebrand Books, 1986.
2. Morales, Aurora Levins. The Story of What Is Broken Is Whole: An Aurora Levins Morales Reader. Duke University Press, 2024.

Academic Articles

1. Junquera, Carmen Flys. “Grounding Oneself at the Crossroads: Getting Home Alive by Aurora Levins Morales and Rosario Morales.” Atlantis: Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies, vol. 39, no. 2, Dec. 2017, pp. 47–67.
   https://atlantisjournal.org/index.php/atlantis/article/download/320/243/2088
2. Cristian, Réka M. “Healing Processes in Aurora Levins Morales’s Remedios and Medicine Stories.” PJAS (Polish Journal of American Studies), 2025.
   https://paas.org.pl/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/18-5-cristian.pdf

Websites

1. “Voices of Feminism Oral History Project: Morales, Aurora.” Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Interview transcript by Kelly Anderson, 2005.
   https://www.smith.edu/libraries/libs/ssc/vof/transcripts/LevinsMorales.pdf
2. “Aurora Levins Morales.” Jewish Women’s Archive.
   https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/morales-aurora-levins

And the voice of my spirit tallied the song of the bird.

Come lovely and soothing death,

Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,

In the day, in the night, to all, to each,

Sooner or later delicate death.

Prais’d be the fathomless universe,

For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious,

And for love, sweet love—but praise! praise! praise!

For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death.

Dark mother always gliding near with soft feet,

Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome?

Then I chant it for thee, I glorify thee above all,

I bring thee a song that when thou must indeed come, come unfalteringly.

Approach strong deliveress,

When it is so, when thou hast taken them I joyously sing the dead,

Lost in the loving floating ocean of thee,

Laved in the flood of thy bliss O death.

From me to thee glad serenades,

Dances for thee I propose saluting thee, adornments and feastings for thee,

And the sights of the open landscape and the high-spread sky are fitting,

And life and the fields, and the huge and thoughtful night.

The night in silence under many a star,

The ocean shore and the husky whispering wave whose voice I know,

And the soul turning to thee O vast and well-veil’d death,

And the body gratefully nestling close to thee.

Over the tree-tops I float thee a song,

Over the rising and sinking waves, over the myriad fields and the prairies wide,

Over the dense-pack’d cities all and the teeming wharves and ways,

I float this carol with joy, with joy to thee O death.

15

To the tally of my soul,

Loud and strong kept up the gray-brown bird,

With pure deliberate notes spreading filling the night.

Loud in the pines and cedars dim,

Clear in the freshness moist and the swamp-perfume,

And I with my comrades there in the night.

While my sight that was bound in my eyes unclosed,

As to long panoramas of visions.

And I saw askant the armies,

I saw as in noiseless dreams hundreds of battle-flags,

Borne through the smoke of the battles and pierc’d with missiles I saw them,

And carried hither and yon through the smoke, and torn and bloody,

And at last but a few shreds left on the staffs, (and all in silence,)

And the staffs all splinter’d and broken.

I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,

And the white skeletons of young men, I saw them,

I saw the debris and debris of all the slain soldiers of the war,

But I saw they were not as was thought,

They themselves were fully at rest, they suffer’d not,

The living remain’d and suffer’d, the mother suffer’d,

And the wife and the child and the musing comrade suffer’d,

And the armies that remain’d suffer’d.

16

Passing the visions, passing the night,

Passing, unloosing the hold of my comrades’ hands,

Passing the song of the hermit bird and the tallying song of my soul,

Victorious song, death’s outlet song, yet varying ever-altering song,

As low and wailing, yet clear the notes, rising and falling, flooding the night,

Sadly sinking and fainting, as warning and warning, and yet again bursting with joy,

Covering the earth and filling the spread of the heaven,

As that powerful psalm in the night I heard from recesses,

Passing, I leave thee lilac with heart-shaped leaves,

I leave thee there in the door-yard, blooming, returning with spring.

I cease from my song for thee,

From my gaze on thee in the west, fronting the west, communing with thee,

O comrade lustrous with silver face in the night.

Yet each to keep and all, retrievements out of the night,

The song, the wondrous chant of the gray-brown bird,

And the tallying chant, the echo arous’d in my soul,

With the lustrous and drooping star with the countenance full of woe,

With the holders holding my hand nearing the call of the bird,

Comrades mine and I in the midst, and their memory ever to keep, for the dead I loved so well,

For the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands—and this for his dear sake,

Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul,

There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.

🌸 Question 1: How does Whitman use natural imagery to express grief?

“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” by Walt Whitman uses natural imagery—especially the lilac, the western star, and the hermit thrush—to transform mourning into a dialogue with nature. The lilac bush in the dooryard, described with “heart-shaped leaves of rich green” and “delicate-color’d blossoms” (Stanza 3), becomes an emblem of memory and renewal. By offering a sprig of lilac to the passing coffin, the poet channels private grief into a ritualistic act of remembrance. Similarly, the star, “droop’d in the western sky” (Stanza 1), symbolizes Lincoln’s death, while the thrush sings “death’s outlet song of life” (Stanza 4), connecting death to a spiritual cycle. These images illustrate Whitman’s belief that nature absorbs human sorrow into its eternal rhythms, offering solace. Grief is not confined to the individual; instead, it resonates with the natural world, which both mirrors and heals human loss.

⭐ Question 2: In what ways is the poem an elegy for Abraham Lincoln?

“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” by Walt Whitman is an elegy that mourns Abraham Lincoln while elevating his death into a universal meditation on loss. The coffin’s journey, described with “processions long and winding and the flambeaus of the night” (Stanza 6), mirrors Lincoln’s funeral procession across the United States. The poet offers his sprig of lilac as a symbolic tribute: “Here, coffin that slowly passes, / I give you my sprig of lilac” (Stanza 6). This gesture personalizes the national mourning, turning Lincoln into both a private comrade and a collective father figure. The “western fallen star” (Stanza 2) metaphorically identifies Lincoln as a guiding light extinguished. Yet, the poem also transcends Lincoln by generalizing mourning to all death, blending the personal with the national. Through its elegiac tone, ritual imagery, and symbols, the poem solidifies Lincoln’s memory in both history and poetry.

🎶 Question 3: How does Whitman reconcile grief with acceptance of death?

“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” by Walt Whitman portrays a movement from anguish to reconciliation with mortality. Early in the poem, grief dominates: “O cruel hands that hold me powerless—O helpless soul of me!” (Stanza 2). Yet as the poem progresses, death is redefined as sacred and even nurturing: “Dark mother always gliding near with soft feet” (Stanza 14). This personification shifts the tone from fear to acceptance. The hermit thrush’s song, described as “death’s outlet song of life” (Stanza 4), reinforces the paradox that death contains life’s continuation. By the end, the poet embraces death’s inevitability: “Come lovely and soothing death” (Stanza 14). This journey shows how mourning evolves into spiritual acceptance. Whitman teaches that death, though painful, is integral to the cycle of existence. The poem therefore consoles by showing grief as a path toward harmony with the universe’s eternal rhythms.

⚔️ Question 4: What role does the Civil War play in shaping the poem’s meaning?

“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” by Walt Whitman is deeply shaped by the context of the Civil War, which provides both background and imagery for Lincoln’s elegy. In Stanza 15, Whitman envisions “battle-corpses, myriads of them, / And the white skeletons of young men,” a stark reminder of the war’s devastating human cost. These images expand the scope of mourning beyond Lincoln to include all who perished in the conflict. While the dead soldiers “were fully at rest” (Stanza 15), the living—“the mother suffer’d, / And the wife and the child and the musing comrade suffer’d”—bear ongoing grief. The war thus intensifies the poem’s elegiac tone, turning it into a collective meditation on sacrifice, suffering, and national trauma. By situating Lincoln’s death alongside the anonymous dead, Whitman ensures the poem commemorates not only a leader but also the countless individuals whose lives were lost to civil strife.

Books

1. Cavitch, Max. American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman. University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
2. Loving, Jerome M. Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself. University of California Press, 1999.

Academic Articles

1. Blasing, Mutlu Konuk. “Whitman’s ‘Lilacs’ and the Grammars of Time.” PMLA, vol. 97, no. 1, 1982, pp. 31-39.
   https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/pmla/article/whitmans-lilacs-and-the-grammars-of-time/65FF9B15716AB831E7FD67BAC25E6FCD
2. Steele, Jeffrey. “Poetic Grief-Work in Whitman’s ‘Lilacs’.” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, vol. 2, no. 3, 1984, pp. 10-16.
   https://pubs.lib.uiowa.edu/wwqr/article/id/26227/

Website / Online Poems / Essays

1. “Lilacs: Walt Whitman’s American Elegy.” Nineteenth-Century Literature, vol. 44, no. 4, 1990, pp. 465-490.
   https://online.ucpress.edu/ncl/article-pdf/44/4/465/574001/3045070.pdf
2. Liu, S. “Accepting Death in Whitman’s Poem ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’.” Clausius Press, 2023.
   https://www.clausiuspress.com/assets/default/article/2023/04/28/article_1682736669.pdf