TerriResse Jones English 102 Walker 31 October 2017 Analysis of Child’s Grave

TerriResse Jones
English 102
Walker
31 October 2017
Analysis of Child’s Grave, Hale County, Alabama
Child’s Grave, Hale County, Alabama by Jim Simmerman is a forty-two-line poem. Its sentences are six lines long. Written in a single unrhymed stanza. A few of the literary devices used in this poem by Simmerman are imagery, metaphor along with symbolism.
One of the imagery’s in this poem is the grave of a child which is in Hale County, Alabama. When you read this poem, you know that it is about a man burying his child, but it is so much more than that. It also is a representation of how families in our country 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” We know that the land does not have a heart, but when reading this poem, you can image that two-by-four being driven through the metaphorical heart of the hard land. I think that Simmerman was also personifying the land by giving it a human characteristic.
There is also symbolism in the two-by-four. It was not only the marker for the grave of the child, but also a symbol of the death of the economy and the death of the people’s hope during the depression. The two-by-four also symbolisms the heart ache of the father who had to bury his child. The father may feel guilty because the child died, and he may feel it is his fault because the child died because of lack of food or medicine that the father could not provide. There was no name on the cross. The cross itself was a symbol that showed where his child was buried, but no name on it for the world to know who was buried there.
This poem by Jim Simmerman was sad, but it shows us a glimpse into the reality of people’s lives back in that time during and after the great depression. To have to bury a child is tragic enough, but having to walk three miles to steal the wood to make the cross and then do it by yourself during the cold December night is heartbreaking.