They May Love All That He Has Rejected Poem Analysis

The world is filled with hypocrisy, prejudice, and hatred that spreads and festers like a disease that no one can contain. Some individuals see this and choose to look in the other direction while others choose to bring it to a focal point. Tracy K. Smith is a poet who chooses to bring awareness to some of these issues through her work. One of Smith’s poems that focuses on these worldly problems is, “They May Love All That He Has Chosen and Hate All That He Has Rejected.” In this poem, Smith elaborates on the four steps of forgiveness to emphasize the themes of discrimination, hatred, and forgiveness.

Poet Laureate, Tracy K. Smith’s work can be commonly described as ambiguous and abstract to its readers. For one to fully understand Smith’s

Smith’s hatred is elaborated by the second step of forgiveness. The spreading of hatred is the theme that is deeply ingrained in the words of Smith’s second stanza. Smith writes on the fact that those who know that they have hatred within themselves look at themselves differently. Some are able to sleep at night as if hatred does not reside within them, while others lie awake at night knowing that it is “bobbing there/On the inside”(8-9). Smith continues with hatred being used for individuals to discriminate against certain races. She speaks on the shootings that devastated America in the spring and early summer of 2009. One of the terrible shootings caused the deaths of young Brisenia Flores and her father, Raul J. Flores. According to Jesse McKinley and Malia Wollan New York Times article, “New Border Fear: Violence by a Rogue Militia” one of the Flores’ killers, Shawna Forde, was described as “having anti-immigrant sentiments that are extreme, at times frightening, even to people accustomed to hard-line views on border policing”(McKinley and Wollan). The only reasoning Shawna Forde had for killing Brisenia and her father was that they were not “American”. Forde’s dislike of individuals who were not considered native to the United States ran so deep that her plan of killing two innocent people did not waver. Hatred consumed her lying within her until she released it upon undeserving