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Theme For English B Analysis

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As seen in “Theme for English B, it takes place in 1951, a time in which racism was experienced in everyday life. Also, how that title implies that the poem is about English class or something related. What got my attention when reading this poem was how it started with an instructor telling a young and colored student to write a poem at home. From the title of the poem I can tell that this is a student and a professor relationship. However, the student was not given a specific topic to write about. The next two lines, “And let that page come out of you- Then it will be true,” provides what he will be writing about, himself. Line six transitions to the student, now the speaker. The author has created a persona, which is a fictitious character …show more content…

He states he is twenty-two years old, I’m sure referring to his age. He then goes onto say that he is colored, which I assume means he is dark skinned. He says he’s from Winston-Salem, which I know is located in North Carolina. At the time this poem was written, in 1951, racism played a huge part in everyday life. Moving onto line eight and nine, he lets us know that he attended more than one schools. He describes the location of one of the schools. The first school he attended was in his home town in North Carolina. Then, in Durham, and afterwards to the college he received this assignment from, “on the hill above Harlem.” Also, I know Harlem is in New York so the college must be too. Line ten describes he is the only colored student in his class and that there was a huge racial barrier between colored and non-colored people. Showing in line eleven through fifteen shows us what routes he has to take to go home. He purposely uses five verses to list his walk home. I can tell that he does not live close the college as the other students might have. During that time he probably lived in the ghetto. Moving on to line sixteen “It’s not …show more content…

He’s in the stage of figuring himself out. Line nineteen describes the speaker wanting to be heard by the classmates. Next, line twenty he is unsure how all of us are separated. Verse twenty one starts off in an almost sarcastic tone. Then line twenty-two through twenty-six follows with doing things others (non-colored) would enjoy to do further implying that races should not be apart in the first place. However, verse twenty-seven says “So will my page be colored that I write?” The author is asking the question of whether or not when he turns his poem into his professor, if it will hold the same importance as if a non-colored student would turn theirs in. Transitioning to verse twenty-eight, “Being me, it will not be white,” I think the speaker is trying to say that because the poem was written by him, whether it is proper or not, will still be considered as a poem written by a “black” person. Verses twenty-nine and thirty-two goes even more in depth to his internal struggle of being colored. He is debating to himself that the paper won’t be white because it’s coming from him and then somewhat it will because the things he likes to do, non-colored like to do as well.

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