Refugee Blues Literary Elements

The speaker of this poem is a Jewish refugee from Germany during the 1930s

This poem is a loose interpretation of the blues form, with twelve tercets and an AAB rhyme scheme

Hitler's voice is metaphorically described as "thunder," evoking not just the fear it creates but also its ambient, inescapable quality.

"Walked through a wood" uses alliterative "W" sounds.
"Thought I heard thunder rumbling" uses both alliterative "Th" sounds and assonant "U" sounds.

As the speaker notes, individuals from Adolf Hitler to a citizen at a public meeting seem to consider the speaker and other German Jews very powerful and dangerous, becoming preoccupied with their presence, when in fact the speaker has almost no power or influence at all.

The consul announces that the speaker is legally dead, despite the presence of the living speaker.

The dog and cat are treated humanely and kindly, though the human refugees are not.

The speaker has sought refuge in a foreign country, only to discover that the new country is a site of exclusion and cruelty.

Blues poem

This poem is set in an unnamed, non-German country in the 1930s, though the speaker also recalls scenes from 1930s Germany.

The poem's tone is tender, rueful, and sad.

The speaker is the protagonist, while its antagonists are those who discriminate against the speaker and others like him: Hitler and bigoted members of the public.

The major conflict of the poem is the speaker's struggle to survive and be treated with humanity in the face of oppressive and inhumane government policies and social prejudice.

The climax of the poem is in its final line, as soldiers search for the speaker.

The poem's third line, which twice repeats the phrase "there's no place for us," foreshadows the exclusion the speaker faces even in a place of supposed refuge. The poem will go on to describe the conditions causing them to flee Germany, but this line foreshadows an eventual return to the topic of the speaker's situation as a refugee outside Germany.

The phrase "we cannot go there now," repeated at the end of the second stanza, is an understatement, shying away from the extreme violence that threatened the speaker in Germany. Later images, such as that of Hitler announcing that "they must die," or that of soldiers looking for the speaker, make clear to readers that this early statement is in fact an understatement.

This poem as a whole alludes to the specific historical situation of Jewish refugees from Nazism. Specific allusions within the poem include Adolf Hitler, the dictator of Nazi Germany. The phrase "daily bread," while used in an idiomatic, vernacular sense, is also a quotation from the Lord's Prayer.

In line 1, the word "souls" is used to mean "people."

In stanza nine, fish are described as "swimming as if they were free," while in stanza ten, birds are described as singing "at their ease." In the first example, the speaker actually steers narrowly clear of personification, acknowledging that the fish only seem to be free to a human observer, but in the latter example, the birds are in fact mildly personified.

Numbers in this poem are generally hyperbolic, and are presented as such by being round numbers rather than specific amounts. These include figures like "ten million souls," "a thousand floors," and "ten thousand soldiers."

The word "banged," as used in stanza four, is onomatopoetic. The phrase "thunder rumbling," in stanza seven, mimics the sound of thunder.