Hey guys, this week’s blog will be involving the poems in Harlem Shadows. Alex Cortis and I, Daniel Kim, are the cohorts. As mentioned in class, scansion and structural analysis will be among the main priorities in exploring and expanding on the many meanings of poetry. What I want to discuss are the other methods and angles you can consider when you unpack more meaning. Some examples that were given to us were slant rhymes and elisions. A few that I want to bring into this discussion are: themes, recurring symbols and words, and approaches to writing the essay.
For the first half of Harlem Shadows, some of the themes were: Struggle, Death, Bravery, Nostalgia, Exile, etc. yet there seems to be a distinct shift in themes in the second half of the collection. Personally, I began to see a shift starting from the poems “Poetry” and “To a Poet.” Some themes I found were: Love, Romance, Seduction, and Conscience. What I found interesting is that despite the very recognizable split between contrasting themes, a few themes are uniformly represented throughout the entire collection, namely themes of: Hope, Nostalgia, Escape, and Sanctuary. My questions to you guys are A) do you think themes are a worth considering when analyzing a poem (why or why not?) and B) in what ways could you incorporate theme into analysis (example: tie it with background information of the poet/poem)?
Another small but potentially important detail I found was that Claude McKay has a particular liking with certain words and symbols and sprinkles them throughout his collection. One of the words I found frequently was the word or associations of “Flower” (The Easter Flower pg 152, A Red Flower pg 184, Flower of Love pg 187, Jasmines pg 192. These are just poem titles; there are many more lines that incorporate the symbol). Using this idea, what are some recurring symbols or ideas that you’ve found within the poems and in what ways can you utilize them for analysis of a poem?
Lastly, I want to discuss different approaches to the essay. The conventional structure of an essay is that the intro paragraph would contain the thesis statement, the body paragraphs would be evidence paragraphs that support the thesis and the conclusion would be a wrap-up plus some food for thought. What I am considering is a structure that makes the intro more of an open door into the poem, use the body paragraphs to explore and analyze the poem, and use the thesis statement in the conclusion paragraph. What are your thoughts about these essay structures? If you also have a different approach to writing the essay what is the structure of it?
English 4W: Transnational America 