Poetry for Students Vol. 10

14 Poetry for Students

The decade of the 1960s could have been a

time for celebration. The United States could have

seized upon the opportunity to commemorate the

one-hundredth anniversary of the end of the Civil

War and the Constitutional amendment that ended

slavery. Instead the hundred years after the end of

the Civil War was marked, or marred, by Jim Crow

Laws and violence.

Naomi Madgett’s choice of the word “centen-

nial,” with its celebratory connotation, as her

poem’s title presents a paradox. This paradox

forces readers to identify her meaning and to scru-

tinize a poem they may otherwise skim because

they’ve heard the story many times. Madgett con-

tinues to employ incongruity in the poem’s mes-

sage. This is a poem about a movement: in this

case, the Civil Rights movement. The very word

“movement” presents a paradox. Movement is not

limited to a single direction, is often incremental

rather than continuous, and is often deceptive.

Likewise, the hundred-year pursuit of freedom

from color prejudice moves forward as well as

backward, and it also stops. Additionally, move-

ment toward justice is deceptive. It cannot be seen

as it happens, but only as one looks back at a land-

mark and measures the distance traveled.

So it is with movement, or change, in society.

Madgett mimics society’s erratic and sometimes

imperceptible pace of change in this poem. Because

it is free verse, the poem does not conform to a

standard meter, which is one of the ways in which

a poet achieves movement in a poem. The poem’s

free verse form contains no intentional rhyme. If

Madgett had used end rhyme, her readers would

have moved quickly through the poem, perhaps

pausing momentarily at the end of a couplet or qua-

train, but then hurrying on toward the completion

of the next rhyme. Perhaps the strongest sense of

movement in poetry is accomplished with internal

rhyme, a device which Madgett used along with

end rhyme to great effect in her poem “Midway”:

“I’m coming and I’m going / And I’m stretching

and I’m growing / And I’ll reap what I’ve been

sowing or my skin’s not black.”

“Alabama Centennial” is devoid of rhyme and

rhythm, and perhaps intentionally so. This poem

moves as justice moves: with stops and starts, fits

and jerks. Its appearance on the page is jagged and

irregular with lines of varying length, many of

which are interrupted with punctuation marks. The

lack of regular pace is fitting. When the word pace

is applied to a liberation movement, an oxymoron

is created. A liberation movement has no real pace,

only a perceived pace, which for the oppressed is

always too slow, for the oppressors is unacceptable,

and for the fearful fringes is too fast.

While it lacks recognizable pace, the poem

manages to elicit a feeling of urgency. However,

this is not the result of standard poetic devices, but

the result of punctuation and sentence length. The

exclamations—“Never!” and “Walk!” and “Now!”

are shouts of urgency. They are also, as single-word

utterances, indicative of commands that demand

immediate response. The use of these commands

and the actions they elicit produce more than a feel-

ing of exigency, they also contribute to the poem’s

underlying irony. In line 10 “a new wind blew, and

a new voice / rode its wings with quiet urgency.”

Only after a single voice called out for freedom did

other voices join the cry, and they joined as echoes.

This image presents a sad irony.

The tragic legacy of the oppressed is that they

are often so scarred by captivity that they evolve

into a group without a voice, and sometimes with-

out a vision. When a strong voice does rise, as one

did with Reverend King, the voices of the op-

pressed masses, when they finally join in, are raised

as echoes—almost as involuntary responses. The

voices that joined the Civil Rights movement

joined, it seems in this poem, in response to orders,

as their ancestors had done for centuries. “Walk!”

the voice said, “And I walked the streets of Mont-

gomery,” and later, “Ride! And I rode the bus for

freedom.” This is in truth sad irony, for one hun-

dred years after the Civil War no black person

should have been testing the waters of freedom for

the first time. No black person should have still

been waiting for an order to exercise an inalienable

right. Fortunately, as was the case with Dr. King,

directives sometimes issue from a beneficent

source, and following them allows the dependent

to move toward independence. Yet oppression per-

sists. It persists for persons of color, persons of

creed, persons of sexuality, persons of age, persons

Alabama Centennial

This poem moves as

justice moves: with stops

and starts, fits and jerks.”