The Holocaust was a catastrophic event in the 20th century. The cruelty people had for each other gets fully displayed during this event. The scale of the event is global; the world still feels the Holocaust’s effects. Many modern poets attempt to capture the horror of the Holocaust. One such poet, Robert Hayden, from a low-income family in Detroit, wrote the realist “From the Corpse Woodplies, Fron the Ashes”, using literary devices to capture a broader message in his art. One of these devices was imagery, words that paint the reader a particular picture. Additionally, Hayden does not use a rhyme scheme, a pattern of rhyming lines across a poem. Finally, Hayden uses a structure that groups word into lines and lines into stanzas in a specific order and length. Hayden utilizes realistic portrayals of life with a lack of rhyme scheme and usage of structure and imagery to bring attention to existing prejudice and depict the harm done during the Holocaust accurately.
Hayden's poem's lack of a rhyme scheme reinforces his writing style and supports his other devices. The purposeful lack of rhymes across the poem makes the poem's words sound more natural, as if a person speaks to the reader. The more natural tone
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The imagery lets the reader see how bad the situation is in their head: "From Johannesburg, from Seoul./Their struggles are all horizons./Their deaths encircle me" (7-9). The imagery in the poem shows a picture of the narrator grieving. The author reinforces that the Holocaust affects everyone, which is what line seven says. Line nine declares that the narrator remembers these people and makes the reader imagine the narrator feeling guilty about the deaths of his friends. The imagery is an excellent example of the depressing imagery Hayden implements in his poem. Thus, through the reader's imagination, the poem's imagery backs up the main idea of harm dealt with during the