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Analytical Essay In the poem “Who Understands Me,But Me” by Jimmy Santiago Baca talks about his experiences and how he felt while he was in prison. This was also about how being closed up in a prison feels like everything you thought you’d always have is now gone. But at the end things will start having its positive ending.

The poem's speaker, Jimmy Santiago Baca didn't exactly live the best life. He was convicted of drug charges and sentenced to a maximum security prison and he was sad. Textual evidence to support this is “they lock my cage, so I live without going anywhere, they take each last tear I have, I live without tears”(Baca 93).

    The renowned poet, Richard Lovelace, once wrote that "Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage." Although many think of a prison as a physical building or a jailhouse, it can also be a state of mind. A great number of people are imprisoned mentally and emotionally. Charles Dickens expresses this message in his eminent novel, Great Expectations. This book is about a simple laboring boy who grew into a gentleman, and slowly realized that no matter what happened in his life it couldn't change who he was on the inside. On the road to this revelation, Pip meets many incarcerated people. Through these people, Dickens delivers the message that people can be

Prisons are not a place that anybody wants to revisit once out. Another poem Baca wrote while in prison is penned, “Immigrants in Our Own Land”, the title of the poem relates to the idea of the prisoners moving into their jail cells. The “Own Land” Baca is talking about is the jail, the jail is now a new home to the prisoners, who Baca refers to them as immigrants. When Baca got to prison he was stripped of his clothes and the belongings he had with him, just like what happens to immigrants when they go to a new land. In this poem it states, “We are given shots and doctors ask questions. Then we gather in another room where counselors orient us to the new land we will now live in. We take tests” (“Immigrants”). In this line, Baca talks about the tier that he was put on after beating up a man the was in his cell with him. The tier he is put on is with all the mentally insane inmates. Once Baca got to this tier he came to a realization that poetry was transforming him. Baca realized that if it wasn’t for poetry he would have killed his cellmate. Baca tells his memoir readers that he heard voice in his head saying, “How can you kill and still be a poet? How can you ever write another poem if you disrespect life in this manner? Do you know you will forever be changed by this act? It will haunt you to your dying breath” (Baca 206). Since Baca has been reading so much poetry the voices of the poets stayed within his mind like his conscious that help him make the right decision. On the Nut Run tier, the guards would come around with carts full of medications and give them to all the inmates on this floor. In Baca’s memoir, he states, “ The zombies only stirred when the meds cart was coming or when a white-coated intern would show up to recruit subjects for some new drug or shock therapy. All of them were blank-eyed, seldom out of their cells, and they never combed or washed unless told to do it”

What are White Lies? When reading “White Lies” by Natasha Trethewey, some may believe that she is simply referring to lies that are made to others in order to make one seem better. However, it is not the case, once one learns about Trethewey’s upbringings. Trethewey was born into an interracial family in the 1960’s, which at the time was illegal.

The setting of the jail helps the audience to think about the reality of the horrible conditions of people who are incarcerated. They prisoners are treated like animals. They have filthy conditions and it similar to living in a barn. It is cold and dark and the bedding is straw. When Herrick enters, it says that he nudges a bundle of rags lying on a bench which implies that you cannot tell that there is even a person in the cell. The audience is aware of how these people suffered for no reason.

A thorough analysis of subject material and literary style exhibits the complexity of establishing a strong thematic base, which does not deter from the ebb and flow of a poetic medium .  In Thom Gunn’s In the Tank, a felon is overwhelmed by emotion at the state of his existence in prison.  In what appears to be a moment’s reflection, Thom Gunn’s narrator in In the Tank reveals an abundance of sentiment pertaining to his environment.  From meticulous description of the prison environment, to the exasperated feeling of loneliness and dejection, Gunn lures an audience into a seeming first-hand account of prison-life.

The father is a drunken man who abuses his son, but the son accepts his father’s actions and continues to seek love from him. The boy would “waltz” with his father while the mother watched with fear, and with “every step you missed, my right ear scraped a buckle. You beat time on my head…” (Lines 11-13). The father drunkenly abused his son, but the son who “...hung on like death...Still clinging to your shirt” (Lines 3 and 16) was longing to be loved. The tone of this poem is violent and harsh due to the unhealthy relationship between father and

This poem focuses on the lynching of a African American male. The speaker of the poem appears to console a woman who appears to be distressed due to the events taking place. In the first four lines of stanza 1, the speaker says:

The poem's structure consists of four stanzas. The first, second, and third stanza follow an abcc rhyme scheme, and the last stanza follows an aabb rhyme scheme. A the reader progresses through each stanza, it is seen that the narrator's dissatisfaction of her confinement

The main theme Hall is trying to express is that once a person has a child, their lives are changed forever. In the first line, “My son, my executioner,” is saying that once a child comes into the world, in a sense the parent’s life is taken away. Yet as morbid as that sounds, the parent’s life is made eternal through their child forever. The father knows his time is now focused on his son. There is a reversal of roles, as the child gets bigger and stronger, the father gets weaker and will die. “Sweet death, small son, our instrument/of immortality.” Another problem was that the parents had their child young. That day the child was born, their lives were changed and it will never be the same again. “We twenty-five and twenty-two.”

The last line in the poem “and since they were not the ones dead, turned to their own affairs” lacks the emotions the reader would expect a person to feel after a death of a close family member. But instead, it carries a neutral tone which implies that death doesn’t even matter anymore because it happened too often that the value of life became really low, these people are too poor so in order to survive, they must move on so that their lives can continue. A horrible sensory image was presented in the poem when the “saw leaped out at the boy’s hand” and is continued throughout the poem when “the boy’s first outcry was a rueful laugh…the hand was gone already…and that ended it”, this shows emphasis to the numbness the child felt. The poem continues with the same cold tone without any expression of emotion or feelings included except for pain, which emphasizes the lack of sympathy given. Not only did the death of this child placed no effect on anyone in the society but he was also immediately forgotten as he has left nothing special enough behind for people to remember him, so “since they were not the one dead, turned to their affairs”. This proves that life still carries on the same way whether he is present or not, as he is insignificant and that his death

writes towards the middle of his essay about seeing the prison being brought up to the hanging site and

While being held in prison for the first time, Baca discovered the beauty of poetry; “my sense of teetering on a rotting plank over swamp water where famish alligators clapped their horny snouts for my blood. While I listened to the words of the poets, the alligators slumbers powerless in their lairs” (Baca). From the use of metaphor to create imagery, Baca showed the reader a scene of how the powerful dictions of the poets can relinquish dangers in his mind. Baca uses such imagery to help the reader better understand how this cruel environment can be transformed through the words of poets.

These two seemingly opposite tones and moods existing in one poem simultaneously resemble the ambiguity in the speaker that he reveals when he describes his condition very ambiguously. For instance, in the first line, he portrays himself as a “dead man”(1), but in the line immediately after, the dead man is moaning, which is biologically impossible. The unclear subject raises the issue of who the speaker is, if he should not be able to comment on himself because he is already dead. When the speaker uses the same pronouns, “he” and “him” from both the first person and the third person perspectives to refer to himself, this becomes even more puzzling; the readers are no longer sure of who the speaker is and who the subject of the poem is. One possible cause of these uncertainties is the discrepancy between the speaker’s real self and his public self; one that resembles who he