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Themes In Beware : Do Not Read This Poem

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Shamsiyya Alhassan
Professor Ball
ENGL 1001
20 October 2017
The Role of Lines One to Four in Beware: Do Not Read This Poem by Ishmael Reed In Ishmael Reed’s 1070 poem, Beware: Do Not Read This Poem, lines one to four represents the backbone upon which the entire of the poem rest. Great writers and storytellers have been known to build a complex body of work, based on a small sample of the work itself. This trend in common even in other forms of art like music, where simple lines composed as the chorus of the song, describe the purpose and intent of the entire song. This is also true in poetry, as well as in prose and in most plays. In a play, a scene in an act can define the structure of the play and a paragraph in an essay can serve as the soul of the essay. The same is true in Ishmael Reed’s 1070 classic poem, Beware: Do Not Read This Poem; a complex body of work whose soul can be understood in the first stanza, which describes the personality of the subject (the reader) and the poem itself. The purpose of this paper is to provide an in-depth analysis about how the beginning four lines help us understand the rest of the poem. To achieve this goal, I have divided the poem into three parts in order to explain how they all relate to the first stanza and to paint a simple picture for understanding this great work. The first section represents a folktale styled intro, introduces us to the personality of the subject of the poem and her relationship to her environment as seen

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