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Figurative Language In Countee Cullen's Tableau And Incident

833 Words4 Pages

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”- Martin Luther King Jr. (August 28, 1963). The racial interactions in the poems Tableau and Incident, written by countee cullen in the early 1900s, were impacted by the tone, figurative language, and the intended themes of each poem. Both poems deal with racism between two young boys, one white and one black. Both poems, Tableau and Incident, written by Countee Cullen, consistently has a powerful tone throughout each poem. The author depicts the tone by the diction and figurative language used, for example, in Tableau he uses words like sable, indignant, oblivious, brilliant and blaze. Another example of how the diction was powerful was he used the word unison. Unison has a positive connotation to the readers because two is better than one. This is a powerful word because when you have one thing by itself it's not as powerful as two things in unison with each other. In the poem Incident the tone changes from happy in the first stanza and once the event in the second stanza happened, the tone changed to crushing in the last stanza. This poem had a change in vocabulary as the mood changed, in the first stanza …show more content…

Just like the tone, both poems have the same overall theme but the way they get there is different. If the poems were characters in a novel, tableau would be a static character because the theme and tone stay the same throughout but incident would be a dynamic character because its tone changed and the theme was supported in the last two stanzas. The theme was influenced by the racial interactions between both

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