Analysis of Leroi Jones A Poem Some People Will Have To Understand Ess

Analysis of Leroi Jones A Poem Some People forget Have To Understand at that place is an implied threat in A Poem Some People Will Have To Understand by Leroi Jones. Ostensibly, there is no intimidation. The poem is confessional, up to now reflective the theme is one of mutability and change. However, there is something frightening and baleful in Jones1 vision, which he creates through attention to word choice and structure. Jones standard is immediately evident in the title through his adult maleipulation of wrangling. The set phrase abide to has two meanings. One the one hand, drive to is an innocuous avouchment of the alliance Jones expects to find among his Afro-American readers--these people will have to date the poem because it speaks to their individual, personal lives. On the other hand, there is a more than sinister con nonation in have to--the idea that others will have to understand this poem because they will be forced to do so. beyond the title, Jones cre ates a forbidding speaker--a man at a crossroads, or rather, at a moment of decision. However, the structure of the first stanza is direct and conservative, almost prosaic. Jones gives us nothing that is revolutionary here. Instead, he lays the groundwork for this piece with the gloomy sign images of (d)ull unwashed windows of eyes(1). These eyes are no doubt those of the speaker, and they have been dulled and dirtied by his existence as a dark-skinned man in the post-segregation 1960s. The industry he mentions in lines 2 and 3 is both the industry of the American machine that exploits the underprivileged, and the industry he practice(s). The speaker is a self-professed slick / colored boy, 12 miles from his / home who practices no industry (35). By ... ...The promised phenomenon has not come, and it is now up to him to bring it about through violence. Jones does not allow the speaker to lose any of his charm as he politely invites his machinegunners--the tools of his rude(a) in dustry--to please step forward (26). He is a hustler to the end, a smooth-talker who is now at home in his new ego and his new profession. Jones employs the dynamics of change to his speaker throughout the poem. From an afloat(p) vagrant to a passionate revolutionary, Jones plots his speakers course using specific words and structural techniques. Through these elements, we witness the evolution of a new black man--one who is not content with the passivity of his earlier spiritual leaders. We are left(p) with a threat--a steel fist in a velvet hand of poetry--and it becomes a poem that we have to understand, whether we want to or not.