Speaker or Narrator, and Point of View
The prisoners are the speakers, and the poem is written from their point of view.
Form and Meter
The form is Fugue, which is a musical piece that has been turned into a literary one. Each stanza begins with a variation on its theme and ends with increasingly blunt and brutal snippets. The poem is not constructed in full sentences and there is little punctuation making it similar to a "stream of consciousness."
Metaphors and Similes
"The Dance" that is referred to is a metaphor for the repetitive actions performed each day by the men; they are digging the graves and listening to his music being played and each day repeats itself like the steps of a dance. The poem also repeats itself with a similar rhythm.
Alliteration and Assonance
No specific examples
Irony
The repeated use of "black milk" is ironic; in the Hebrew scriptures, the "promised land" is the land of milk and honey. Celan uses irony to turn this vision of paradise upside down and the 'milk' of the land that is promised in the poem is black and filled with something dangerous and destructive, not the milk that they have been dreaming of at all.
Genre
War Poetry
Setting
Un-specified Nazi work/death camp during World War Two
Tone
Barbaric, ironic, fearful
Protagonist and Antagonist
The Jewish prisoners and the protagonists, the Guard the antagonist, and it can also be seen that the Nazi regime as a whole is the antagonist to the German Jews' protagonists.
Major Conflict
The conflict is World War Two, but within that global conflict is the Nazi war on the Jewish race and their desire to wipe them out completely.
Climax
The climax of the poem is the death that comes to the prisoners at the end when he shoots them and this is seen as relief from the living death of the camps. As the words seem to become more discordant and jumbled within the thought processes of the men, it has a "faster and faster and faster on the merry-go-round" effect as the nightmare builds until the inevitable conclusion which is the prisoners' deaths.
Foreshadowing
The prisoners are digging graves which foreshadows death, either their own, or the deaths of other prisoners for whom they are digging the graves.
Understatement
No specific examples
Allusions
Marguerite is a character in the epic poem "Faust" written by 19th-century writer Goethe. Similarly, Shulamith is a princess from the Hebrew "Song of Songs' in the Old Testament. Both of these allusions are also allusions to something that is central to the existence and the viewpoints of both the Nazis and the Jews.
Metonymy and Synecdoche
The Jews and The Prisoners refers to each of the men in the poem, which illustrates that not only do the Germans see them in this "mass" way but that they have also been conditioned to view themselves as a mass rather than as an individual.
Personification
No specific examples
Hyperbole
No specific examples
Onomatopoeia
No specific examples
