112 pages • 3 hours read
Jesmyn WardThe Fire This Time
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
“The Tradition” by Jericho Brown
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Poem Summary: “The Tradition”
Jericho Brown’s sonnet meditates on the names of flowers, which recur in italics throughout the poem. The speaker, writing as a third-person plural we, references the heat of past summers and how “me and my brothers” (1) take videos of blooming flowers. They speed up the videos, and Brown turns to “poems / Where the world ends, everything cut down” (1). In the final line he names, in italics, three black men who were killed by police: John Crawford, Eric Garner, and Michael Brown.
Poem Analysis
Invoking the names of flowers, Jericho Brown meditates on ephemerality within the scope of history. He references ancient philosophers’ naming flowers and “our dead fathers” (1), presumably the slaves of America’s past. The poetic speaker and his peers call to be remembered by filming flowers before they pass on. The flora are a metaphor for black men, thirsting for “proof we existed before / Too late […]” (1). The environment of the poem also resists these flowers, which “bloom against the will / Of the sun […]” (1). Moreover, in further nod toward resistance, African Americans tended the land in the United States, but the second line points out that the soil did not belong to them.
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