21 pages • 42-minute read
An Agony. As Now.
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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. Initially, the speaker describes the body using third person pronouns like “his” (Lines 3, 5). The distinction between “I” (Line 1) and “he” (Line 3) emphasizes the chasm that exists between the speaker’s soul and his body. Yet the speaker starts using the second person “you” (Line 15) in stanza three. This “you” (Line 15) refers to the speaker’s past self, who he has left behind. But the ambiguity of this language allows the speaker to simultaneously engage and incriminate his reader in the poem. This language sounds like a direct address, a challenge to those who trap the speaker with their racism.
Imagery
Despite the abstract subject, Baraka grounds the poem in physical imagery. The soul is physically trapped in “the enclosure” (Line 12). The body is “hard flesh” (Line 9) that is “rubbed against” (Lines 10) the speaker. The extended metaphor of the body as an unfeeling machine contrasts with the images the speaker uses to describe the intense pain he feels. It has a physical effect on him that causes pain as “all his / flesh hurts” (Lines 19-20). The wide variety of sensory details contributes to the poem’s central image of a soul trapped inside a physical body. The speaker describes the external world with positive images of “cool air” (Line 8) and “light” (Line 9). All the small moments he describes where the body encounters someone else are described as moments of torture for the soul. This imagery contributes to the poem’s accusatory, tense tone.
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