What Role Does Freedom Play In The Poems You Read In This Unit?

1. What role does freedom play in the poems you read in this unit? Write about at least three of the poems, describing how the poet uses imagery to depict freedom, the lack of it, or the desire for it.

Answer:
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They left the land of their slave past and moved toward the promise of freedom in the north, but the people of the “Great Migration” met with the cruel reality that their struggles were not over, that although a war had been fought and won, emancipation was only the beginning for African Americans and their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness-the American Dream. There’s a phrase from a song, “pouring water on a drowning man,” and that’s surely how it must have felt to journey north after
Freedom or the lack of freedom was the seed, the energy, and underlying theme that drove the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance, like that of Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen. These two poets use such deceptively and, yet, deeply effective imagery, reaching out to the reader to move him or her to a well of distilled truth. The language is direct, the images strong, and the essential, clear. Langston Hughes, in his poems, “I, Too”, and “Dream Variations”, as well as Countee Cullen’s “Any Human to Another” speak so eloquently and with such dignity and strength, that one is at once struck by a truth that seems new again and urgent even if one believed to have known that truth before and this is achieved through the use of imagism. Through imagism, these two poets exemplify how this literary device aims at clarity of expression through the use of precise visual images. It was the dream deferred of which they “sang,” freedom, each one’s nature-given-manna for which they strained,
“I am the dark brother.” (Line 2) He is symbolizing black and white America as brothers and he is stating that the black brother, the black sheep of the family is nonetheless part of the family. “I, too, sing America.” (Line 1) As the black sheep, he is not allowed to take part at the table, parenthetically, “of freedom”. The “darker brother” isn’t esteemed enough as having the intelligence and depth to appreciate the fineness of freedom; as if the white brother has the moral authority to judge his black brother lacking, or the moral high-ground to claim superiority and deny African Americans what is by nature belonging to all according to the defining American “creed”-that “all men are created equal...” While African Americans may, for a time, feel weakened by such mistaken belief or even believe it themselves and pale for the lack of freedom’s nourishment, they are not, however, waiting passively. “…I laugh, and eat well (in the “kitchen” or the scullery room to freedom), and grow strong.” (Lines 5-7) The black brother takes his time in the “kitchen” to learn, to stretch out and grow and gain a better understanding of his rightful place in the world, to gain confidence. One day it won’t be a matter of permission, no one is going to simply let him sit at the “table”; he will have the confidence and strength to take a seat of his own. Having that strength, no one will