Lucille Clifton Speech

Rowan McIntyre Suzanne Callis English 2 28 May 2024.

Lucille Clifton: the Next Step Forward Since the beginning of time, every human has gone through some form of emotional pain. As we know, expressing how you truly feel is tough in most situations. It is difficult to seem like you have your life together when you talk about everything that is wrong with you. So most of the time, this pain is left undiscussed and pushed aside. Trying to find a way to show what is going on inside is nearly impossible. With her brilliant use of simple wording, anyone can feel attached to the lines she writes about one simple, difficult thing: pain. Using a colorful display of her playfulness and personality, Clifton dissects an array of inner conflicts in her

The speaker goes back to look at their roots in America and try to move past it. To connect the previous analysis of the “past waiting for her”, we can infer she is talking about her race. As she is “learning a new language”, and “remembering faces, names, and dates”, the speaker is understanding the history of slavery and oppression of African-Americans in the United States. As the speaker comprehends her roots, she is able to overcome the discrimination she faces/ has faced. The character Clifton creates makes the idea of oppression simple and clear, something that connects to a wider loneliness that everyone experiences. The fun nature of personification is seen in Clifton’s other work as well, along with the African-American struggle. To connect to this idea, “Sorrows”, by Lucille Clifton, is the speaker’s personal dissection of the feelings of sorrow that she experiences being African-American. With personification and imagery, this poem applies to a larger idea of the human struggle of understanding and overcoming the problems we deal with. The title “Sorrows” is an introduction to the feelings of hopelessness

In the opening line, the character “Sorrow” appears. She describes “Sorrow” as a “Winged” (Clifton, 1) being, and that this being can “Fall in love with mortals” (Clifton, 4). The repeated usage of the words “They” and “Them” is seen a lot, making this human-like. This brings the intangible feeling of sorrow to life by the speaker. They are “Winged” creatures that can fly away and return to their lover. Their love, so real and so physical that they can “attach themselves to scars and ride the skin”. Everyone deals with the creature that is sorrow, but some deal with this through forms of self-infliction. This creature which attaches as “Scars and rides the skin” is this emotional pain manifested physically. The root of this pain stems from different places, but the feeling is ubiquitous. The title immediately brings up the idea of sorrow, waiting to be controlled by the speaker with the next words written. Her relationship with her identity is brought up, describing her individual struggle with sorrow, dealing with who she is as an African-American. Later in the poem a new form of sorrow is described, imagined as a skeleton. These skeletons can be