Daybreak in Alabama Literary Elements

The speaker is someone who desires to be a “colored composer” and who seems to be a writer.

Free verse

Metaphor
The entire poem makes use of an extended metaphor about music. The harmony of the music created by the “colored composer” is not only that of sonic consonance, but it is also a social harmony that unifies society in an idealistic future. Daybreak is not only a literal shift from night to day, but a shift from injustice and intolerance to peace and unity.

Simile
The first similes of the poem occur in lines five and six where the music that the composer creates is compared to swamp mist and soft dew. These comparisons describe the rising and falling movement of the music and the beauty of the sound despite its unfavorable origins:

“Rising out of the ground like a swamp mist
And falling out of heaven like soft dew” (line 5-6)

The last simile of the poem occurs toward the end of the poem where the speaker describes hands of different races touching each other:

“Touching each other natural as dew” line 19

This simile posits the connection between different races as natural instead of artificial or restricted, as it would have been during the time that this poem was written.

“I’m gonna put some tall tall trees in it” line 7

This line contains alliteration because of the repetition of the “t” sound. The word tall is repeated not only to emphasize the height of the trees, but also to maintain the rhythm of the previous lines.

Lyric

Mid-20th Century, Jim Crow Alabama

Optimistic, Idealistic, Hopeful

The climax of the poem is the fourteenth line where the speaker writes that his music is “Of black and white black white black people.” With this repetitive syntax, the speaker introduces the idea that the colors in his music do not just represent nature, but also the skin color of people of all races.