"After the Winter" Claude McKay

"After the Winter" By Claude McKay

About Claude McKay

What is Rhetoric?

Claude McKay was born in 1889 in Sunny Ville, Jamaica. He was the son of peasant farmers. They infused McKay with racial pride and a great sense of his African heritage. His work ranged from celebrating peasant life in Jamaica to poems challenging white authority in America. Also, he wrote generally straightforward tales of black life in both Jamaica and America.

Rhetoric is the art of effective or persuasive speaking or writing, especially the use of figures of speech and other compositional techniques. Some examples of rhetoric are anaphora, metaphor, oxymoron, and parallelism.

About Claude McKay's Work

Personification

Is this poem rhetorically effective and how do you know?

Subject

Personification is the attribution of a personal nature or human characteristics to something nonhuman. In "After the Winter", Claude McKay uses personification. "And wide-mouthed orchids smile," on line 8. Orchids don't actually have the ability to smile. But in the poem, McKay gives them that human-like characteristic.

“McKay does not seek to hide his bitterness. But having preserved his vision as poet and his status as a human being, he can transcend bitterness. In seeing ... the significance of the Negro for mankind as a whole, he is at once protesting as a Negro and uttering a cry for the race of mankind as a member of that race. His human pity was the foundation that made all this possible.” -Arthur D. Drayton (“Claude McKay’s Human Pity”)

The subject of McKay's poem is to be patient. He wants people to know that if they wait patiently, something good will come out of it. During the time McKay wrote this poem, African Americans were losing hope in gaining the equal rights as everyone else.

"After the Winter" by Claude McKay is rhetorically effective in many ways. He uses personification, ethos, imagery, logos, and alliteration to help readers better understand his poem. Those rhetorical devices are needed more for people reading it today because without researching Claude McKay we would never know that the poem is really about African American equal rights.

Tone

What is SOAPSTone?

Ethos

From Claude McKay

Purpose

Ethos is a rhetorical device that refers to the credibility about the writer and how reliable his writing is. I believe Claude McKay is a very reliable source. McKay was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, a prominent literary movement of the 1920s.

"Never cut a tree down in the wintertime. Never make a negative decision in the low time. Never make your most important decisions when you are in your worst moods. Wait. Be patient. The storm will pass. The spring will come." -Robert H. Schuller

SOAPSTone is an acronym for a series of questions that students must first ask themselves, and then answer, as they begin to plan their compositions. They are:

• Who is the Speaker?
• What is the Occasion?
• Who is the Audience?
• What is the Purpose?
• What is the Subject?
• What is the Tone?

The tone of Claude McKay's poem is hopefulness. He wants to inspire the people. He wants them to come together even more than they have been. He is trying to make sure African Americans stay involved and to make sure they are heard.

The purpose of Claude McKay's poem is to inform the people that there is a light in the end of the tunnel. That something good will come out of all this destruction. McKay also wants people to have the same amount racial pride and sense of African heritage as he does.

"Idealism is like a castle in the air if it is not based on a solid foundation of social and political realism."

"Nations, like plants and human beings, grow. And if the development is thwarted they are dwarfed and overshadowed."

Speaker

Imagery

Alliteration

Audience

The speaker in the poem "After the Winter" is Claude McKay himself. Throughout the poem he says, "We'll turn our faces" and "We will seek the quiet hill" indicating that McKay and someone else is doing these actions.

Imagery is visually descriptive or figurative language, especially in a literary work. McKay uses imagery quite often in his poems, especially "After the Winter". Some examples of imagery in his poem are, "shivering birds beneath the eaves," and "bamboos spire the shafted grove."

Alliteration is the occurrence of the same letter or sound at the beginning of adjacent or closely connected words. McKay uses one alliteration in his poem. "With black-ribbed blue-bells blowing near," on line 15. The letter B is at the beginning of most of the words in the line.

The audience for McKay's poem is everyone involved in African American rights. Also, the audience should be educated to be able to read and understand McKay's poem. They should also be up-to-date on the national news.

Occasion

Logos

When Claude McKay wrote "After the Winter", African American rights were a big issue. Most of McKay's writings were based around African American civil rights. Being raised with great racial pride and sense of his African heritage caused him to feel strongly about equal rights.

Logos is another rhetorical device that refers to how logical a piece of writing is. I believe McKay's poem is logical for the time period he wrote it in. He wrote about getting through diversity while in the mist of the Civil Rights Movement.