Speak

The poem has a regular rhyme scheme that can be represented as ABABCDCD. In Stanzas 1 and 2, the second and fourth lines have perfect rhymes, in which different consonants are followed by identical vowel sounds and final consonant sounds (if any): “do” and “you,” “sun” and “won.” However, most of the rhymes in the poem are imperfect, also known as off-rhyme, near rhyme, or slant rhyme. In this case, Wright’s final consonants rhyme but the vowel sounds do not. Thus, in Stanza 1, “voice” is rhymed with “place” (Lines 5, 7), “turn” with “spin,” (Lines 5, 7), and “end” and “blind” (Lines 6, 8).

The fourth line in each stanza is end-stopped, as indicated by a period. End-stopping means that the end of a poetic line coincides with the conclusion of a grammatical unit, in this case a sentence. The poem also employs enjambment, also called a run-on line, in which the sense and grammatical construction of a phrase is not complete at the end of a line but continues into the next one. The reader must go to the next line to grasp the meaning. The first two lines of the poem show enjambment: “To speak in a flat voice / Is all that I can do”; another example is “I have gone forward with / Some, a few lonely some” (Lines 33-34). Enjambment is typically used to convey urgency and a surfeit of emotion, which here works to heighten the speaker’s pleas to God.

An allusion is a brief mention of or indirect reference to something that lies outside the poem, such as another poem or work of literature, a historical event, or a person. The poet who makes an allusion expects his reader to recognize the reference. In this poem, Wright makes several allusions. First, to a famous passage in the biblical Book of Ecclesiastes, which he had every reason to believe the reader would recognize: (“[I] saw under the sun / The race was not to the swift / Nor the battle won” (Lines 10-12). Next, he alludes to the 1965 boxing World Heavyweight Championship fight between Sonny Liston and Muhammad Ali. This fight took place only three years before the poem was published and received a huge amount of publicity in newspapers and on television. The final allusion is to the execution of George Earnest Doty, referred to as Ernie Doty. Convicted of a notorious murder in Ohio in 1950, Doty was subsequently executed in 1951. No doubt the name Doty was still widely recognized in Ohio in the 1960s, and Wright wrote two other poems entirely about Doty.