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Comparing The Poem Between The World And Me By Richard Wright

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Richard Wright’s poem “Between the World and Me” mourns the tragic scene of a gruesome lynching, and expresses its harsh impact on the narrator. Wright depicts this effect through the application of personification, dramatic symbolism, and desperate diction that manifests the narrator’s agony. In his description of the chilling scene, Wright employs personification in order to create an audience out of inanimate objects. When the narrator encounters the scene, he sees “white bones slumbering forgottenly upon a cushion of ashes,” and a sapling “pointing a blunt finger accusingly at the sky.” The white of the bones represents purity, and their slumber indicates their eventual peaceful rest. The scorched little tree points at the sky to reproach God himself for allowing such a horrific event to take place. Nature is brought to life in order to parallel death and the otherwise idyllic setting that surrounds it. …show more content…

Wright creates and revisits the existence of “a whore’s lipstick” on the trampled grass. The lipstick is red, a color symbolic of passion and rage and bloodshed. The narrator analyzes the lipstick as belonging to a prostitute, due to the fact that the woman in question is concerned about her appearance during a horrific, brutal murder. Makeup is used to change one’s appearance, and the narrator feels an inexplicable rage towards the woman and her lipstick in this context, possibly because the victim of the lynching was killed for his own appearance. The symbol of the discarded lipstick exemplifies the callous nature of the witnesses that the persona is able to interpret from the aftermath of the

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