Thursday, September 26, 2013

How is anger portrayed in Baraka's poem "Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note?"

Start the analysis of anger with the title and I think
that one can get an idea of where it is located in the poem.  The idea of a suicide note
indicates one level of needing to speak and articulate one's voice.  Yet, the idea of a
twenty volumed suicide note is intense to the point where anger is present.  The speaker
has much to say and has a great deal to indicate in what needs to be articulated.  It is
here where there is anger, an intensity that would fill a twenty volumed suicide note. 
In the poem itself, the first stanza's articulation of the day to day mundane state of
the speaker's life is undercut with the idea revealed in the one lined, second
stanza:


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Things have come to
that.



This line helps to
indicate where the speaker is in his life.  The idea of an existential reality defined
by the most mundane of tasks such as walking the dog or missing the bus help to reflect
a state of affairs where resignation have given way to anger in such a terse
articulation.  A similar reality is presented in the fourth
stanza:



Nobody sings
anymore.



If taken by
themselves, the second and fourth stanzas help to reveal a certain amount of anger
regarding where the speaker is in the world.  This condition is one where "things have
come to that nobody sings anymore."  There is noticeable anger and regret in both of
these conditions, something to which the speaker does not shy from.  The question would
be whether the speaker's anger can be mollified by the solitary state of his daughter's
prayers at the end of the poem.  The alienation and dislocation the speaker experiences,
along with the anger that accompanies this is something that collides head on with the
solitary daughter praying into her own hands, perhaps for the subsiding of her father's
anger and sense of loss.

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