Imagery In Richard Wright's Between The World And Me

Richard Wright operates haunting imagery, vehement symbolism, and tranquil diction in “Between The World And Me” to portray the narrator's absolute horror and disgust toward the scene he has found and to denote the narrator's disdain with the people who can perpetuate such an awful crime. Throughout his poem "Between the World and Me" author Richard Wright combines the switches between melancholy to shock to nostalgia to gruesome and violent imagery along with a shifting point of view to create a vivid and surreal scene. The narrator stumbles on the evidence of deplorable violence, but the evidence that remains is all dormant, reflected by tranquil diction such as slumbering, cushion, vacant, and empty. The “torn tree limbs, tiny veins of burnt leaves, and a scorched coil of greasy hemp,” the items that played a crucial part in the execution that took place are all now dormant. Still, the aura of the place of execution, in particular the "scattered traces of tar, restless arrays of feathers, and the lingering smell of gasoline”and the “charred stump of a sapling pointing a

The narrator comes upon the site in the morning, just as "the sun poured yellow surprise into the eye sockets of a stony skull", he feels the ground grip his feet and his heart being "circled by icy walls of fear.” Wright juxtaposes images of violence and childhood innocence and in the narrator's reverie, he becomes the victim and as “a night wind muttered in the grass and fumbled the leaves in the trees,” as “the woods poured forth the hungry yelping of hounds” and “the darkness screamed with thirsty voices” the narrator is left shivering surrounded by a thousand cruel faces, and bloodied and tortured by callous hands. He vicariously suffers beating, humiliation, tarring-and-feathering, and incineration-driving home the horrors of the victim's experience in a shockingly immediate