Close reading for George Elliott Clarke’s Negation Essay

The poems heading Negation is rounded about the circumstance that the write is taking new path in the poetry comment by trying to etch out a new personal individuality for oneself but this is continuously difficult for time and again there is a distinction between white and blackness commonly referred to as racial gratification. The definition of the word negation also speaks volume about the difficulty beness experienced by the precedent as the inability to accept something that already exists.Ideally, form is one of the most fundamental aspects that are easily renowned about poems. It is evident that the poem is presented as a lyric with xiv lines but goes against the norm of rhyme schemes and adopts the iambic pentameter vacuous sonnet mien where each line of the poem is divided into ten syllablesCITATION Mab00 p 52 l 1033 (Mabillard 52). The syllables in each line are divided into iambic feet which are attuned to the idea that a stressed syllable is followed by an unst ressed syllable for type Na and Sty to form nasty as expressed in the poem. The initial twelve lines of Negation bring to line the issue of racial identity and prejudice as the dominating factor that George Elliott seeks to attend to. He reflects on Shakespeares character Caliban in The Tempest who he describes in quite a harsh words as being, (Slick black bastard cannibal-sucking back Licorice-lusty, fifty-proof whisky), this is practiced representational of the authors disgustCITATION Lan01 p 13 l 1033 (Lancashire 13).However, in the final 2 lines of Negation i.e. the couplet, the author comes out in support of black revolution by resolving his antecedent stand a classical representation of couplets where an author resonates on his sentiments in the first three quatrains of the poem. With specific interest is Frantz Fanons work the Black skin, egg white masks illustrates George Elliotts sentiments in negation as being a global problem with whites continuously despising blac ks in their mother tongue and literacy writings recognition can be made to line golf-club of the negation poem that points out blacks as, Nasty, Nofaskoshan negro, I mean.. and goes on to the next two linesCITATION Cla08 p 33 l 1033 (Clarke 33). The writing Nofaskoshan is in black dialect which generalizes the peck of Neva Scotia a province in Canada with inhabitants of African descent. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon also mirrors the same but in defense of the black race. He refutes with the lines, Dirty nigger Or simply, Look, a Negro // I came into the existence imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit make full with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object lens in the midst of other objects. // sealed into that crushing object hoodCITATION Fan52 p 109 l 1033 (Fanon 109).Looking at Fanons sentiments, we see the moving-picture show of blacks as subjects of the whites, most interesting is the inability of bl acks to identify themselves as subjects and yet objects of service to the white, they are constantly in push to break by from the old york. Notice in the last two line stanza (couplet), the author is still in struggle with where his real stand is, this two-line stanza of a blank sonnet is usually meant to resolve the recurring theme in the previous stanzas but in this case author make a reference to the second person you depicting the debate that even though he agrees to the fact that change in black perception is evident he still has not fully accepted this fact.ReferencesClarke, George Elliott. Blues and Bliss . raw(a) York Waterloo , 2008.Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks . Atlanta Grove Press , 1952.Lancashire, Ian. Blue . Vancouver polestar Books , 2001.Mabillard, Amanda. Shakespearean Sonnet Basics . New York Barnes & Noble , 2000.Source chronicle