Home (Warsan Shire poem) Literary Elements

The poem shifts between first-person and the unusual second-person perspective, using both "i" and "you" as the subject of the poem. The speaker seems to be a refugee herself, and she describes the harrowing experience from her own point of view; but she also speaks as a kind of collective migrant consciousness. The poem moves in and out of the speaker's individual perspective, featuring snatches of scenes from other refugees and quotes from people that the refugees encounter.

The poem consists of eleven stanzas of varying length, with no consistent rhyme scheme or meter.

The poem drives home its message through many metaphors, including the second line, "home is the mouth of a shark" and line 56: "home is the barrel of the gun." The poem also contains the simile, "like a sick animal," at line 34.

The poem contains several examples of alliteration, including "fire under feet" at line 14, "blood in your belly" at line 15, "stripped and searched" at line 37, and "smell strange, savage" at line 43.

The poem contains extremely dark examples of irony. One of its great ironies is that after escaping from the horrors of violence at home, refugees still experience violence in the camps where they arrive, even though the camps are supposed to be precisely a refuge from violence. After running from gang rape, the narrator still experiences sexual assault from a prison guard, the very person supposed to keep her safe. This expresses the fact that often times law enforcement another harmful force that refugees have to face, leaving refugees still unsafe upon their arrival in supposedly advanced, civilized countries.

The poem is a work of contemporary political poetry.

The poem details the speaker's escape from her unnamed home country to a different country, most likely a first-world country.

The tone of the poem is desperate and angry, detailing the harrowing experiences the speaker had to suffer through to reach a semblance of physical safety where she is not welcome.

The protagonist of the poem is the speaker, most likely a woman of color, who has to flee her home country. There are several antagonists in the poem, including the circumstances that made her home country too dangerous to live in, other refugees who mistreat her badly as well as the residents of the country she eventually flees to who show her only ignorance and racism.

The major conflict in the poem is the fact that the speaker has to leave her home village, because it has become an uninhabitable environment, and faces cruel, ignorant and humiliating treatment both by men in her home country and the residents and law enforcement in the country she flees to.

The climax of the poem is in stanza 8, when the speaker reveals the full extent of the horrors she had to endure during her time at home and during her escape.

There are no instances of foreshadowing in the poem, which instead delivers its central message in the first stanza.

The poem alludes to a wide variety of contemporary migration patterns, without ever specifically mentioning any of them. The speaker refers to the European refugee crisis as well as the South American migration crisis culminating in many migrants being trapped on the US border. Each of these situations is deeply complex and rooted in long histories of conflict, Western interference, climate change, and political unrest.

In the poem, "home" is personified as an entity that actively chases its inhabitants away in order to save them. Home whispers to its inhabitants with a "sweaty" voice as it sends them out, expressing horror at what it has become.

The poem contains several examples of hyperbole, including line 4, "the whole city," and line 10, "a gun bigger than his body." However, although these are exaggerations, they may not be far from the truth.

There are no instances of onomatopoeia in the poem.