Race, Death, and Urban Life in American Poetry Analysis

Personification of Death in 'Go Down, Death'

The dominant figure of speech in Go Down, Death: A Funeral Sermon is personification — specifically, death personified as a man on a pale horse. This figure of death is personified in order to make death seem more benign and less frightening. Death is shown as a compassionate, invisible figure on a silent horse who takes Sister Caroline from a place of misery to heaven. Rather than a terrifying force, death is presented as a magnificent presence, riding past the sun and the moon and cooling the dead woman in his embrace as he carries her before God.

Because Death is not terrifying, and because it is the very figure that brings humans to God in the poem, the reader is encouraged not to fear death in his or her more literal encounters with mortality in real life. James Weldon Johnson uses this gentle portrayal of death to offer spiritual comfort, transforming what might otherwise be a moment of grief into one of release and divine reunion.

Race and Memory in Countee Cullen's 'Incident'

"Incident" is a short poem that depicts the speaker as a young girl being called a racial slur for the first time, upon visiting Baltimore. The shortness of the poem, in contrast to the length of her stay — nearly a full year, from May until December — underlines the potency of the incident. The poet states that being called the slur is all she can remember of her entire journey to the city.

This suggests that the incident was a turning point in the life of the poet. It is her first encounter with prejudice, and it utterly defines her experience from that moment onward. The economy of the verse is itself a formal argument: so crushing was this single moment of racism that it consumed every other memory the child might have formed. The brevity of the poem forces the reader to sit with that devastation, with nothing else to distract from it.

Nature vs. Civilization in Stevens and Sandburg

Wallace Stevens's "Anecdote of the Jar" depicts a man-made object — a jar — as a metaphor for the city that grows up in the wilderness of Tennessee. The wilderness sprawls around the jar, untamed and sprawling. However, despite the sleekness of the jar, there is something chillingly empty about it, because unlike the wilderness it does not "give of bird or bush." Because the wilderness is alive, it seems far more attractive than the tall, sleek jar that contains nothing. The jar imposes order on the landscape but sacrifices vitality in doing so.

Carl Sandburg's "Chicago" takes a sharply different approach to the city. Chicago is depicted as the "hog butcher of the world," filled with hungry people and "painted women." Yet the poet sees this as a source of pride rather than shame. He openly admits to the reader that his city has many faults, and this stark honesty makes the reader believe him when he praises the city, because he has already acknowledged its ugly side. Despite the negatives, Chicago is shown to be fundamentally, vitally alive. The images of the city are "fierce as a dog" and "cunning as a savage." Sandburg's terse adjectives and verbs create a sense of strength and brutal fascination that conventional praise would lack.

The issue of race in Go Down, Death: A Funeral Sermon is addressed indirectly rather than directly. The sermon is evidently being delivered to a Black congregation, and the suffering of Sister Caroline is shown to be uniquely Black in nature through references to her toil in the vineyards — an allusion to the cotton fields — endured through long, hot hours. Sister Caroline has furrows of care in her brow because of the suffering that is part of the African American condition. Life is so hard that death is shown as a respite, a release from a world of unrelenting labor and pain.