21 pages • 42 minutes read
Amiri BarakaAn Agony. As Now.
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1964A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Form and Meter
The poem has 45 lines broken up into nine stanzas of varying lengths. Each stanza describes a different aspect of the speaker’s suffering, jumping from physical to psychological and back.
There are no consistent meter, rhyme, or line lengths. While the poem does not adhere to traditional forms, it does have a strong sense of rhythm developed through its use of punctuation, line breaks, and line lengths. These devices create a fractured flow to express the speaker’s rage and racing thoughts.
First-Person Point of View
The speaker is a soul, trapped inside a body that is treated as a distinctly different entity. The first-person perspective highlights the psychological tension between a speaker, who wants to be an active force, and his trapped reality. The speaker must “look” (Line 2), “Smell” (Line 3), and “Love” (Line 5) as his body does. The first-person perspective helps contribute to the enraged tone of the poem, as it allows the reader to directly access the speaker’s emotions as he describes the pain and alienation he experiences.
The language used to refer to the source of the pain shifts.
