Speaker or Narrator, and Point of View
The speaker is an unidentified black speaking in the first-person perspective.
Form and Meter
Free verse with no specific meter, rhyme scheme or form.
Metaphors and Similes
Examples of both in a single line: “And in a blaze of red I leaped to the sky as pain rose like water, boiling my limbs.”
Alliteration and Assonance
Both of these literary devices are on full display in the poem’s opening lines: “And one morning while in the woods I stumbled / suddenly upon the thing.”
Irony
Considering the racial implications of the act of lynching, that the first description of the victim is in as “a design of white bones” is pretty ironic.
Genre
African American poetry
Setting
A clearing in the woods on bright morning in an unidentified locale.
Tone
Angry, disturbed, hallucinogenic and apocalyptic.
Protagonist and Antagonist
Protagonist: The speaker/lynching victim/African American society. Antagonist: Racism/racists/so-called “innocent” spectators of a lynching.
Major Conflict
Racial tension between blacks and whites in America.
Climax
The poem reaches a climax in the extended ending in which the speaker himself hallucinates that he has become a victim of a lynching.
Foreshadowing
The evidence of the actually lynching which has taken place foreshadows the details of the hallucinogenic lynching of the speaker.
Understatement
Not applicable: understatement is a not a viable strategy in this poem which depends upon melodramatic extremity to serve its purpose.
Allusions
“The sun died in the sky” alludes to the moment during the crucifixion of Jesus when darkness hung over the sky as reference to the lynching victim being a sacrificial lamb crucified by his murderers.
Metonymy and Synecdoche
The recurring references to “dry bones” mark them as an example of synecdoche symbolizing not just the whole body of the victim, but his life.
Personification
Most significant example being, perhaps: “There was a charred stump of a sapling pointing a blunt / finger accusingly at the sky” and
Hyperbole
“And a thousand faces swirled around me, clamoring that / my life be burned” is a hyperbolic inflation of the actual crowd of onlookers who probably actually took part.
Onomatopoeia
“the woods / poured forth the hungry yelping of hounds” and “The dry bones stirred, rattled”
