jasper texas 1998

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1998

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form and meter

This poem has no consistent meter, reflecting the speaker’s informal speech. By having varying stresses and line lengths, Clifton creates extemporaneity—the head’s thoughts seem to be coming to him without design. The lack of strong stresses means that words gain emphasis from their specificity and power, rather than from their position.

The poem consists of three stanzas. The first two stanzas are composed of five lines each, while the final stanza has six lines. By adding one more line, Clifton suggests that the speaker is finding his voice and speaking more confidently. Moreover, its outlier status gives this additional line extra emphasis. The speaker’s frustration and anger serve as a call to action for the reader of the poem. Simply “sing[ing] we shall overcome” (Line 13) is not enough in the face of such violence.

Point of View

The poem’s first person point of view, using first-person pronouns, is a key feature of the poem. However, the speaker is not the murdered man himself, nor his ghost. Instead, the speaker is Byrd’s decapitated head. Choosing to give a voice to a now inanimate object is a sort of personification that rehumanizes the victim after a barbaric act of racism dehumanized him. The head is once again a living thing.

Throughout the poem, the pronoun “I” is never capitalized, suggesting that while the poem gives the victim his voice back, it remains an undervalued voice. Capitalization in poetry often indicates importance. In this case, the speaker doubts his importance—his lynching has forced him to wonder whether he still qualifies as a human being, or whether he even wants to be considered as one, when his murderers are also ostensibly human beings.

Rhetorical Questions

In the second stanza, the speaker asks three rhetorical questions—questions that do not necessarily expect or have an answer. This poem uses rhetorical questions to fuse the ideological and the personal. The first two questions ask the reader to consider the wrongness of forgiveness and unity after an act of brutal racial violence perpetuated by the dominant racial group. They raise the philosophical idea of the concept of humanity as something elevated and separate from other creatures. Yet the last question is deeply personal, as the head asks, “what does my daughter say?” (Line 10). This question makes the reader reflect on the personal loss for the man’s family, and gestures towards the generational trauma of racial violence in America.

By posing these ideas as questions, the poem involves readers in a conversation, forcing them to empathize with the speaker’s perspective without letting them fall back on easy answers provided by platitudes. In this way, Clifton criticizes those who call for immediate forgiveness in the face of violence without addressing the underlying systemic issues.