对美国黑人诗作的赏析.doc

Association of the word “dream” in two American poems英商1122 朱晓洁 1133307221AbstractThe article focuses on one theme of holding fast to dreams. The word “Dream” is particularly referred to the hope and faith caught by black people. The whole text place an emphasis on the fight and revolt when black people are faced with the miserable race segregation and discrimination and their positive attitude and unyielding spirit to the prejudice. Two poems Still I Rise by Maya Angelou and Dreams by Langston Hughes both express one voice and strive for the same goal. I also compare their writing style and techniques in the test and associate them together to have a better understanding about their writing background and themes they want to deliver. After analyzing two poems, I cant help remembering the famous speech I Have a Dream by Martin Luther King. They all focus on the same goal and express the same feeling. Catch your dream and never give up, no matter what color, race, religion and nationality you belong to , all people deserve the same human right of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.Key words: African American people; race; discrimination; hope; rise; never give upAssociation of the word “dream” in two American poems “If I can reach higher, just for one moment to touch the sky ” Every time I appreciate the inspiring melody, I cannot help waving my hand, swaying my body and hamming this familiar tune. The unforgettable tune sent waves of longing and desiring through me over and over again. Earnest Hemingway once said in The Old Man And The Sea“man is not made for defeat . A man can be destroyed but not defeated”. All this motivates me to stress the importance of power of faith and hope. I was especially interested in African American Literature and have learned that there exist three climaxes in history. Also, different periods have its unique characteristic. The two poems I quote just coincide with the second climax: black people are active in fighting for equality and basic right after a series of revolts. One is Dreams from Langston Hughes, the other is Still I Rise from Maya Angelou. Both poems place an emphasis on a common topic: hold your dream and never give up. Keep in mind that hope is always available to us and you can make a difference to your life. We have to note that the word “dream” has its specific implication. It means all men, black men as well as white men , would be guaranteed the unalienable right of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Black people can be away from the discrimination, oppression and the unfair treatment. Under such circumstance, Langston Hughes has determined to hold up his pen as a weapon to expose the miserable, harsh reality of American black people. He uses two vivid metaphors as imaginations of dull, inactive life without motivation. He compares the hopeless life to a barren field and broken-wigged bird. All efforts will be in vain if you become disoriented in the way forward and that is the basic fact he exhorts his readers to know. The concise language adds some sort of aftertaste. Besides the rhetorical device like metaphor, the author also uses “parallelism”. It emphasizes the same structure, pay equal attention to the meaning within phrases and paragraphs to form a whole. The author uses the same syntactical structure to make it full of passion and intense emotion.As the famous poem, playwright and civil rights activist, Maya Angelou has made a lot of contributions to American literature. Still I Rise is one of her representative works and it has been adapted to a public welfare advertisement. Still I rise is a poem that focus on the pride ,courage and survival in oneself, which can also be applied to the African American. As she rose from poverty and segregation, she knew the hardship of black people, so the theme she wants to deliver is also based on race and civil right. Due to her true emotion, her work can have such a long-lasting infectivity. In the first stanza, “you may trod me in the very dirt. But still, like dust, I will rise ” Angelou described how the body can be beaten down and decompose into soil , which means that although flesh can be destroyed, it is spirit that can keep us alive and go forward. Tragically, black people are most often the ones whose human rights are violated. They can suffer from pain in body, but they deserve to redeem their respect ,dignity back. Nothing can shake the foundation of strong will power of black people.In the last three stanzas, she uses“I rise ”repetitively. It is expected that the loud shout may awaken those numb white people with high emotions. They want to make a vigorous start and rise up again. When you have a chance to read those sentences, the specific rhythm and intonation will uncontrollably haunt in your mind. As she said in the last stanza, “bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave, I rise”. As the posterity of black slaves in history, they inherit all the excellent qualities including persistence, tolerance, modest and hardworking etc. A powerful sense of mission and national sense of honor underpins every practice they do. What obligation they have to fulfill is to secure the honor and keep up to the expectation. Besides repetition, Still I Rise uses two other rhetorical devices, metaphor and parallelism.From the poem, we can see the real inner world of black people. They are just regular people seeking the simple thingthey just want to know that they matter. They want acceptation, to sum up, they just want to be heard.It occurs to me that a famous speech “I have a dream”by Martin Luther King. He imagined and depicted a harmonious picture that the vast majority of white people and black people can live together, make collective efforts to improve the quality of human life and want justice for all human beings that abide in our land. What impressed me most was “let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you , my friends. And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream”Martin Luther King expresses his dream that all discrimination against black people will be null and void today. Although black people in some regions are still languished and find themselves the exiles in some lands, the prospect for the future is quite good. Under the influence of the civil right activists for black people, the unfair situations have been mitigated a lot.However, it is still a long journey for human society to go to seek the same human rights as Martin Luther King addressed in his speech more than forty years ago. It is the dream of all human beings on the planet to let freedom, democracy and equality cover every corner of the world. Nowadays, black people have gained