20 pages • 40-minute read
Walking Down Park
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Literary Devices
Free Verse
Free verse has become very popular in modern poetry. Most poets incorporate it to make poems sound more like natural speech, creating the feeling that the speaker of the poem is talking directly to the reader. In the Black Arts Movement, poets enhance this effect by further eschewing not only conventions of rhyme and meter but also academically “proper” punctuation and capitalization. The result is poetry that mimics the freedom of speech and informal writing. It represents a culture that had historically been restricted from attending universities and institutions of higher learning. Rather than trying to fit in to Eurocentric society, the purpose of writing without capitalization and punctuation was (and is) to celebrate a distinctly “Black” culture and elevate it to the heights of European-dominated arts and letters.
Rhetorical Questions
The poem’s speaker repeatedly asks, “do you ever stop / to think” (Lines 3-4). The purpose is not to elicit a response from the reader, but to engage them in thinking as the speaker does. It is also a way of calling attention to what the reader may or may not have considered. If the speaker has not stopped to think about a different world, it calls into question their capacity to imagine, think differently, or demonstrate independent thought. It implies that some are not stopping to think about a different world. Some people are accepting the world as it is, while the speaker suggests that the reader and society at large should “stop” what they are doing and become more conscious about the past and the potential future. Giovanni leaves open the possibility that the reader has stopped to “think” about all of these historical elements of pre-colonized society. This makes the rhetorical question less confrontational and more inviting. It allows the reader to participate in the speaker’s machinations.
Repetition
Repetition forms the backbone of Giovanni’s piece. It helps give this free-verse poem a sense of structure and coherence. As the poem moves across the landscape and across time—from past to future—repetition creates a parallel that holds diverse thoughts together. It also mimics public speeches and/or sermons, which traditionally make use of repetition. This technique aids in world-building and vision-building, encapsulating multiple people in the same society. Through this repeated call to “stop and think,” the speaker creates a world that demonstrates fecundity and the largess of nature. The speaker draws a picture of not only one plant or tree, but rather the scope of “elephant ears” (Line 53), the “parrots” (Line 56), the “banana tree from one of the monkeys” (Line 59), and the “antelope bark” (Line 35). The repetition is itself the point. It shows how abundant both the speaker’s imagination and the potential gifts of nature are when they are allowed to roam free and multiply unhindered.
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