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Marilyn Nelson's View Of The Lynching Of Emmett Till

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Poet Marilyn Nelson uses the third person perspective to tell the story of the lynching of Emmett Till and his mother’s pain. She uses plants and trees and their symbolic meaning to counsel and console Emmett’s mother and the reader. She introduces the poem with a passage from Shakespeare’s Macbeth where she compares Ophelia’s pain at the murder of her father to the pain experienced by Emmett’s mother. She ends the poem by graphically describing Emmett’s murder and her own personal sorrow. What I found to be interesting was Nelson’s use of things so beautiful as flowers and trees as metaphors to describe something as ugly as lynching. She uses vivid imagery and Philippe Lardy’s illustrations to describe the blood thirst of the murderers

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