The Black Man's Burden Literary Elements

African-American poetry/Response literature

The setting of the poem is the then-contemporary American of the author which was shaped by the context of Rudyard Kipling publishing “The White Man’s Burden” two months earlier and the American declaring victory in the Spanish-American War the previous year.

The conventional interpretation given the title of the poem and its author is that the speaker who narrates the verse is a black man. This interpretation is neither supported nor denied by anything specifically within the text. All that can really be said for sure based on the text itself is that the narrator enjoys a firm grasp of irony, is capable of subtly conveying sarcasm, and is outraged by racism, imperialism and religious hypocrisy.

The tone throughout is consistently ironic with heavy dependence upon sarcasm. The pervasively outraged but historically grounded mood of the poem takes sudden turn in the last stanza to become apocalyptic and more philosophical.

Protagonist: minority cultures and societies. Antagonist: racist imperialism; white supremacy; Rudyard Kipling.

The conflict which drives this poem is between black society and powerful and influential white men in government who believe it is their duty and burden to civilize those societies to save them from themselves.

The poem reaches its apocalyptic climax with the speaker adopting a prophetic person warning those who accept or believe in the idea of the “white man’s burden” to remember that they are all facing a countdown toward Judgment Day when God can be expected to hold them accountable for their sins.

The closing imagery of the third stanza foreshadows only the entirety of the 20th century as it warns white Americans that everything from owning slaves to turning a ignoring the presence of racism “will some day trouble breed.”

“You’ve sealed the Red Man’s problem” offers a breathtaking example of understatement in its comprehensive and ironic definition of how white American solved their Indian problem through a host of abominable solutions including genocide.

The poem is written as a direct response to Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden” without mentioning either Kipling or the title directly. Thus the whole poem acts an allusion to Kipling and his poem.

Imagery is effectively utilized to convey horrific acts of racist hate too offensive to explicitly name in a poem published for public consumption. By only alluding to the unnamed acts through imagery, they become all the more powerful depending upon individual interpretation: “And fiendish midnight deed, / Though winked at by the nation”

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The poet specifically writes his response to Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden” so that specific and obvious parallels exist. The titles, for instance, diverge by just one opposition word. The opening lines of each stanza of the poems are likewise paralleled through a small but notable alteration Kipling’s “Take up the White Man’s Burden” becomes “Pile on the Black Man’s Burden.” The parallel between the poems is also drawn through the replication of form, meter, and rhyme scheme. Attention is also brought to the parallels between them by the primary difference in construction: the narrative about the black man’s burden is shorter as though it has been constricted in comparison to the bigger, longer, and grander poem about the white man’s burden.

“Why heed long bleeding Cuba / Or dark Hawaii’s shore?” is an example of metonym referencing the name of a place to represent its people.

“Your Jim-crow laws and customs, / And fiendish midnight deed, / Though winked at by the nation” is also another example of metonym, but servicing the device of personification by attributing racist deeds to the country itself rather than to its people.