Poem Analyzed: Niggerlips, by Martin Espada Upon simply glancing at the title of the poem, intrigue immediately draws the prospective reader into reading it – and in my case, analyzing it. Fortunately for me, I was not disappointed with my selection. This poem illuminates the hardships and mental anguish suffered by black people – more specifically, the author, his father, and great-grandfather – at the hands of whites. Martin Espada first describes being called “niggerlips” in high school by his peers, then goes on to describe how his great-grandfather was kept a secret by the family due to their shame of his “blackness.” Finally, the author describes his fathers struggle for acceptance not only from his peers, but also within himself. The descriptions of the difficulties faced by both the great-grandfather and father seem to exemplify the “tragic view of the mulatto,” in which they both experienced an innate feeling of not belonging to either white or black culture, thus facilitating a damaged psyche.
This content of Espada’s poem is further enhanced by the way he uses language. Upon completion of my analysis, I thought of the author as a chef who sprinkles just the right amount of various ingredients (in this case, elements of craft) into his dish, with the finished product coming out just right. Espada does not saturate his poem with different aspects of language, but incorporates enough, all seemingly in the perfect places, to maximize the effectiveness of his writing. In short, he packs a lot of punch into not a lot of writing.
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The diction is low throughout, as he keeps his word choice direct and simple, yet very concrete. While staying concise, the poem surprisingly provides stunning imagery. This is especially apparent throughout the entire first two stanzas. With the poem being only three stanzas long – ten, seven, and twelve lines in length, respectively – Espada was very crafty with his inclusion of detail, putting in the proper amount to enhance the imagery, but not cause the poem to become overly prosy. He even manages to incorporate metaphor, simile, and synesthesia into his poem, which also surprised me due to the low diction and simplistic voice in which it was written. The metaphor comes at the end of the poem, with his family saying his father “is still a fly in milk.” In the middle of the poem is the simile, in the form of “to scare niggers like crows off a tree.” Finally, seven lines into the poem is the synesthesia, where he writes “grinned deliciously.” Even more amazing than the numerous types of language used in Espada’s succinct, yet effective poem is how it is structured.
For starters, I failed to pick up on any kind of consistent rhythm within the poem. The overall pace is a little quicker than a normal poem because of how concise it is. Espada did not incorporate a lot of rhyme into his poem either. The type of rhyme that is most prevalent in his piece is off rhyme. We see this at least once in each stanza, and multiple times in the last.
By using off rhyme as his means of rhyming, Espada does not completely abandon an intricate part of the poem, but at the same time he avoids making it less effective through shifting the readers focus from the more important content to the less important rhyme scheme. In fact, such off rhymes as “classrooms / tattoos ,”green / grinned ,”tree / he ‘d,” and “still / milk ” are not only structurally sound, but cleverly and intentionally placed. The pace of Espada’s poem is very much dictated by the syntax and line breaks. Word order and sentence structure is for the most part normal, but there are areas in which they, along with the line breaks, place emphasis on key parts of the poem. We see this initially through the enjambment in line one of the first stanza, in which the words “for me” are taken from the first sentence and placed alone in line two as an end stop. This line break puts focus on the writer and the fact that he is being called “niggerlips.” Another area that illuminates this is in the second stanza, where the fifth line, “to scare niggers,” is obviously placed alone to show its emphasis.
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In addition to this, syntax and line breaks display how the poem should be read. Enjambment and end stops, along with caesuras, are all used in the poem to guide the reader. The separation of stanzas within Espada’s poem shows not only a shift from one part of his “story” to the next, but also a shift from one generations story to the next. The authors’ hardships are the focus of the first stanza, while the second stanza serves as a sort of confirmation to the issues / focus within the poem. Interestingly, the third stanza goes backwards in a sense, all the way back to the authors great-grandfather, then proceeding to his father; almost as if the author chopped the first two stanzas off the end of the poem and placed them at the beginning. Focusing even more on the internal rhyme within Espada’s poem, the heavy use of assonance, repetition, alliteration, and anaphora arguably constitute the second most important element of the poem, next to its content.
Multiple instances of assonance occur throughout the poem, “school / tattoos ,” and “each / green ” to name a few, that illuminate the formation of a partial rhyme by using identical vowel sounds. Repetition occurs only a few times, and it’s mostly through common words such as “the,”my,” and “family.” Alliteration is probably most prevalent throughout the poem, as Espada repeats the initial consonant sound of words multiple times – “called / car ,” forearm / faces ,” and “stubborn / still ” are only a few examples of such. Lastly, anaphora only happens once in the poem, in the second stanza, and it is used to emphasize the importance of those two lines within the stanza.
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