Lines to My Father Literary Elements

Lines to My Father Literary Elements

Speaker or Narrator, and Point of View

The speaker is not identified by name or any specific individual qualities, but through context, it can be assumed that the point-of-view is that of an African American with a Christian theological perspective.

Form and Meter

The poem uses verse which adheres to no particular form.

Metaphors and Similes

Opening line “The many sow, but only the chosen reap” is a metaphor for economic inequality.

Alliteration and Assonance

The final line of the poem: “Of elemental rage: storm, stress, and shock.”

Irony

The entire second stanza is written in a highly stylized formal style that stands in ironic juxtaposition to the poorest economic class.

Genre

African American Poetry/Harlem Renaissance Literature/Spiritual Poetry/Political Poetry

Setting

Both the time and place are indeterminate.

Tone

The tone of the story is partially indicated by the title. Context ultimately reveals that the “Father” in the title is a reference to God.

Protagonist and Antagonist

Protagonist: the protagonist of poem is God the Father. Antagonist: those with “weak wills” who aspire to “heritage without travail.”

Major Conflict

Although the opening lines create imagery related to economic inequality, the conflict is not really located in the financial aspect of the inequality. The conflict is eventually revealed to be one existing between those who accept the idea of having no control over the heritage into which one is born while being extended the gift of being able to overcome those conditions through struggle and commitment.

Climax

The poem builds to its climactic final stanza in which even being born into the heritage of slavery has proven surmountable through acts of will and struggle capable of withstanding the most intense of opposition.

Foreshadowing

The first three stanzas provide imagery of the labor of sowing producing the benefit of reaping as a foreshadowing of the central message of the poem which arrives in the fourth stanza. That message is in the form of thanking God for crafting mankind with respect which fosters a merit system in which hardship pays off in the wages of improving one’s conditions.

Understatement

“The shyest of your dreams” is an understated way of describing the conditions of slavery as a heritage one is born into which creates the most difficulty expressing any hopes or dreams of improvement.

Allusions

N/A

Metonymy and Synecdoche

“If from the soil our sweat enriches sprout” is a metonymy description covering the entire activity of human effort to plant, nurture, and reap crops.

Personification

N/A

Hyperbole

The suggestion that “One meagre blossom for our hands to cull” resulting working so hard in the field that one’s sweat helps to water the crop can produce a shout of praise at life’s great bounty is definitely an example of hyperbolic overstatement.

Onomatopoeia

N/A

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