Comparing Justice In Brother, Victim, And Criminal

The poetry dramatizes the conflict between Devastation vs Justice, particularly as this conflict relates to what the speaker seems to say. From “Brother, Victim, and Criminal”, the speaker is a man, who get the news that his brother just died. The poem is about a man who gets delivered news by a policeman that his brother has died. The action has occurred when the man finds out that the policeman took his brother life. The speaker’s motivation is to figure out how to cope with life without having brother in it. The poem juxtaposes how the speaker feels grief by saying “Those startling blue eyes that will never pierce me again” to express that his brother is gone forever.

In the first stanza, a man gets news that his brother Joel has died,

The syntax is abstract, meaning that a word ends with a period, but another word comes right after it, also ending with a period. The vocabulary is simple with the words like “ startling”, “ recoil”, and “ dull”, by accentuating the message of the man losing his brother. The poem did not have any rhyme, due to the poem being free verse. The patterns of sound brings out the key words in the poem by illustrating alliteration and personification. The alliteration in the poem is “ Standing at the scene of the shooting”, by stressing that’s where the crime took place. The speaker uses personification by portraying how the man feels about losing someone you love by using the words “ a raging waterfall”. The imagery is so powerful, by expressing “ The sight of his misery threatens to shatter my heart into a millions pieces”, emphasizes how you feel the sorrow coming off of the policeman. There is a major shift in the poem that addresses the changes in perspective from the man to the policeman. The poem ends with the line “ One less criminal on the loose” by connecting how the policeman needed justice served and the only way to do that is by taking the Joel’s