Speaker or Narrator, and Point of View
Mostly a dialogue between a black mother and daughter, but with a third-person omniscient narrator at the poem’s conclusion.
Form and Meter
As the title suggests, the poem is a ballad. Composed in common ballad metrical form of alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter.
Metaphors and Similes
N/A
Alliteration and Assonance
The opening line combines alliteration with rhythm to situate the ironic tone of the poem. The horrific content is juxtaposed with the almost nursery-rhyme bouncy quality of the language.
Irony
Ironic is the driving force of poem as the mother’s advice and actions unwittingly send the daughter to her death.
Genre
Narrative poem/Broadside ballad (to be distributed as propaganda)
Setting
Birmingham, Alabama. Although not specifically identified in the text, the narrative is based on the the events of September 15, 1963, the day when four little girls actually were killed in a church bombing.
Tone
Ironic.
Protagonist and Antagonist
Protagonist: Mother and daughter. Antagonist: Racism, personified in the person who set the bomb to go on in antagonistic response to the Freedom March
Major Conflict
The major conflict here is the history of the United States: black citizens versus white racism.
Climax
The climax occurs at the moment the mother hears the explosion.
Foreshadowing
“But that smile was the last smile / to come upon her face” foreshadows the terrible consequences coming as a result of the mother’s sending the daughter off to the church instead of the Freedom March.
Understatement
“O, here’s the shoe my baby wore” lends the revelation that the daughter has been killed in the explosion an almost unspeakably tragic power resulting from the understated treatment of what she finds at the site of the explosion.
Allusions
The little girl’s desire to attend the “Freedom March” is an allusion to the series of organized marches throughout the south in the 1960’s as part of the Civil Rights Movement.
Metonymy and Synecdoche
The mother smiling at the belief her daughter will be safely protected from the potential for violence which often accompanies Freedom Marches by being ensconced at the “sacred place” is a synecdoche for the actual physical church.
Personification
N/A
Hyperbole
N/A
Onomatopoeia
The descriptive term “clawed” to describe how the mother is searching for her little girl in the explosive rubble of glass and brick conveys the sense of maternal desperation that might remind readers of the legendary maternal instinct in the animal kingdom.
