Poetry- Country Lover, Preacher Don't Send Me, Memory, My Grandfather Gets Doused, My Father Washes His Hands

Out of all the poems for this week’s reading I enjoyed Maya Angelou’s work the best. The collections of her poems all have similar structure and form, and include rhymes. You can definitely tell from her writing that she is from the south and African American.

In Country Lover by Angelou the speaker is someone who is telling about a boy at a dance, who will dance with anybody’s daughter. I believe this is a poem where the speaker is mediating and the reader is listening in. Words like “Saddy” and “Red soda water” are what I consider southern dialect. In this poem Angelou uses couplet rhyming, blues-shoes, pants-dance, and water-daughter. The title sums up with this poem is about.

Another poem by Angelou is Preacher Don’t Send Me. This poem is directed toward the preacher of the speaker. She is telling the preacher what she wants to hear heaven is like. She wants there to be jazz music, nice people, and the season to be fall. Once again the words the author uses give a strong reference to the south (“grits”, “jazz music” and “season is fall”). The setting is probably in a church. This poem contains rhyming words on lines 2&4 and 6&8 of each stanza; also each stanza is eight lines, carrying on the structure and form of Angelou’s work.

The Memory is slightly different than Angelou’s previous poems. Memory as the title implies, is a memory. This poem is like Country Lover, as there is no true audience, just the reader able to overhear what the speaker is thinking. Cotton and sugar cane help develop the setting. This poem makes me think that the speaker was a slave working his life away. The rhyme scheme for this poem is line 2 and 4 of each stanza, and each stanza consists of 4 lines. Angelou also uses a refrain in this poem, every other line starts with And.

 In My Grandfather Gets Doused by Fred Chappell the speaker is the grandson of the man getting baptized. The title gives the reader an idea of what is to come but calls it getting doused instead of baptized, which gives an idea of the Grandfathers final feelings about being baptized. This poem is made up of tercets with rhyming words on every 1^st and 3^rd line. The setting is clearly at the Pigeon River. I believe the theme of this poem is that it is ok to be different, and you shouldn’t do something just because others think you should.

My Father Washes His Hands by Fred Chappell tells how a man (the father) feels about farm life. The setting of this poem is on the family’s farm. The Speaker of this poem is the son; the audience would be the father. This poem gives classic examples of how a son looks to his father for answers. You can tell the father has had a hard time recently farming and is thinking about quitting. This poem doesn’t have very much structure, instead it is more open-form poetry.