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Laurence Paul Dunbar |
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Prayer A Prayer
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"A Prayer" is a lyric poem about a prayer, who is suffering pray, to his God, and Paul Laurence Dunbar refers to what the Black-American have to suffer during his time. They have no way out, so they pray with their God to have them go through those days. The poem is iambic tetrameter (have four feet per stanza). The author use literacy device such as alliteration, metaphor, and assonance. In the first stanza, the author use long assonance and consonance devices to describe difficulties and achievements of Black Americans; also, he uses this device to create the rhyme and rhythm. For example, Dunbar uses O such as O, LORD(1); oh, soothe(3), thorn(4), trod(6), God(8), flow(9), so,(11), he also uses long i vowel such as miles(1), feet(2), smiles(3), complete(4) ect. Next, Dunbar uses metaphor device to express the difficulties of the Black society and their hope. Such as, he uses hard-won miles(1), stumbling feet(2), thorns were thick and keen(5), trembling trod(6), wounded feet(8) to infer their difficulties. In addition, he uses metaphor device such as heart is aching(11) and gracious balm(12) to infer their suffers, and they hope go help them go through these hard days. By the rhythm of "A Prayer" the author leads the readers to the hard time when the black Americans have to face such as discrimination. Finally, the author shows his thirst for freedom. When readers this poem, they will understand the poem more clearly when they know the specific historic circumstance at that time. As a result, they have to approach the poem historically. When people read this poem, it will help if they know Dunbar was a Negro and how white people against black people. As a result, the auditors could feel Dunbar thirst for freedom, and how bad he wants to achieve it; also, the readers could understand how faithful his prayers through this poem. |
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