Child’s Grave

Child’s Grave, Hale County, Alabama by Jim Simmerman is a forty-two-line poem with six each sentence being six lines longs and it is written in a single unrhymed stanza. A few of the literary devices used by Simmerman in this poem is imagery along with metaphor and symbolism.
One of the imagery’s used in this poem is the grave of a child in Hale County, Alabama. When you read this poem, you can tell that it is about a man burying his child, but it is about so much more. It also is a depiction of how families were struggling during the depression. This grave also represents the death of the country during the depression. The land is described as so hard that even in less difficult years the unforgiving land would snap the head off a shovel. There are metaphors used in this poem. “Someone drove a two-by-four through the heart of this hard land” The land does not have a heart, but you can image that two-by-four being driven through the metaphorical heart of the hard land. Simmerman also personified the land by giving it a human characteristic.
This poem uses symbolism also.