"won't you celebrate with me" begins with a rhetorical question—a sentence that has the grammatical form of a question, but is intended to reveal something about the speaker or make a point rather than to actually obtain a response from the listener. The question that begins (and forms the title of) this poem is highly emotionally impactful. For one thing, simply through the act of asking a question, with its implications of uncertainty and need, the speaker reveals her vulnerability. She is making a request of the reader, showing her own desire for support and company. At the same time, the question puts the reader in an equally vulnerable position. Whether they want to be or not, they become implicated in the poem, asked to provide a response yet unable to do so. Both reader and speaker, through the inclusion of the rhetorical question, are exposed to one another. Here, we'll discuss some other well-known poems that have made use of this literary device.
Lucille Clifton shared a close relationship with the Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes. Indeed, Hughes's inclusion of Clifton's work in a 1970 anthology helped jumpstart her career. One of Hughes's most famous works consists of a series of rhetorical questions, creating a wistful tone that reveals its speaker's desperation and hope. The poem "Harlem" begins with the question "What happens to a dream deferred?" The speaker's subsequent speculations happen in the form of rhetorical questions, such as "Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun?" These questions suggest sadness and uncertainty. By the second half of the poem, the speaker has opted for statements rather than questions, as if no longer hopeful enough to inquire. Yet the poem ends with a rhetorical question: "Or does it explode?" This closing question serves to highlight not uncertainty but rather the ever-present possibility, however faint, of change.
In William Wordsworth's early Romantic poem "The Solitary Reaper," a lone speaker comes across a rural laborer, singing a folk song to herself in the Scottish highlands. The speaker asks, rhetorically, “Will no one tell me what she sings?” Here, in a work focused on the isolated beauty of rural areas and their residents, the question spotlights the lonesomeness of both the speaker and his subject. Indeed, nobody can tell the speaker what the woman sings. The request for information, which cannot be fulfilled, makes the speaker appear all the more alone and emphasizes the cultural and linguistic barriers between the speaker and the singing woman. The act of asking a question that cannot be answered reveals the radical isolation of the poem's setting and characters.
Finally, the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda's Book of Questions is an entire volume consisting of thought-provoking and often surreal rhetorical questions. Some of these questions conjure vivid, evocative scenes: "Tell me, is the rose naked / or is that her only dress?" Neruda writes, in a question that includes fanciful personification. These questions often serve as windows into strange and unfamiliar realities and ways of thinking. For instance, the question "Is it true our desires / must be watered with dew?" implies the existence of a world in which these dew-watered desires are considered common, while "What happens to swallows / who are late for school?" seems to assume the reality that swallows attend school. These questions are surprising and humorous, and their proximity to one another sheds light on the flexibility of the question form.
These offer only a narrow sample of works employing the rhetorical question. The device appears frequently in non-Anglophone literature as well as writing from the English-speaking world, and it is present in prose as well as poetry. Moreover, rhetorical questions are an element of non-literary language, appearing in conversational speech. Each of the poets discussed here, as well as a great many others who use rhetorical questions in their work, do so in ways that fit within their distinct stylistic goals. For instance, critic Robin Becker noted the way that the device served Clifton's characteristic concision, writing, "Clifton’s poetics of understatement—no capitalization, few strong stresses per line, many poems totaling fewer than twenty lines, the sharp rhetorical question—includes the essential only.”
