16 pages • 32 minutes read
Selma, 1965
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Literary Devices
Form and Meter
House’s “Selma, 1965” is a free verse poem. It does not rhyme or have a set metrical pattern or rhythm. Written in a combination of short and long lines, the poem consists of a single stanza made up of 23 lines. House uses several poetic literary devices to create music and rhythm in this poem, such as repetition, enjambed lines, lyrics, and alliteration.
House’s use of lyrics in Lines 6-7 is a moment when the poem breaks into music and rhythm. The children sing, “Before I’d be a slave, / I’d be buried in my grave…” (Lines 6-7). These lines feature an end-rhyme, which is when a poem has lines that end in words that rhyme or sound very similar. By including lyrics in her otherwise free verse poem, House culturally draws on the traditional work songs sung by slaves during the era of slavery. Formally, House breaks the poem from free verse into rhyme, drawing attention to these lines and setting them apart from the rest with italics. Another moment where House uses sound within a line is in Line 11 when she uses alliteration: when the same letter or sound occurs at the beginning of two or more neighboring words (“rain-rutted dirt roads” [Line 11]).
House also creates varying rhythms in her poem by alternating between long and short lines. Imagery drives the line length. For example, in Line 12, the image of the marchers walking “through the puddles waiting cool for bare feet” (Line 12) extends the line well beyond many of the shorter lines in the poem. House does this again in the following line, when the poem uses a parenthetical aside that starts with a command (“Touch” [Line 13]) to describe the bright smell of a leaf. These moments of extension—often accompanied by an image—are contrasted with short, crisp lines (such as “in Selma” [Line 2] and “We watched them come” [Line 9]).
Enjambment
House uses enjambment in “Selma, 1965,” which is a literary device when a line runs from one line into another without the use of end-stop punctuation. The opposite of an enjambed line is an end-stopped line, which is when a line ends with a grammatical boundary or punctuation (such as a dash, period, or colon). An enjambed line, however, carries over and extends the thought to create a suspension in the poem. House repeatedly uses this in “Selma, 1965” to layer details, much like scenery changing in a set of a play. For example, the poem opens with four lines that add detail with each. First, the speaker states, “Amid the ghosts of civil rights marchers” (Line 1), followed by “in Selma” (Line 2), which sets the place, followed by “in the summer so hot” (Line 3). The fourth line adds the detail of children “[singing] in the paths / of the afternoon showers” (Lines 4-5). Thanks to the repetition of these lines (represented by the repeated word “in” at the start of Lines 2 and 3) and the use of enjambment, these opening lines establish a layering effect.
Another example of an enjambed line that suspends the drama of the poem is between Lines 9 and 10 when the speaker describes the marchers approaching: “We watched them come / across the lawns of the housing projects” (Lines 9-10). By breaking the sentence between “come” (Line 9) and “across” (Line 10), the reader is left for a moment wondering how the marchers came, what they looked like, and who they were. With the single line “We watched them come” there is a moment of pause as though the marchers are gathering, swarming, and approaching. These moments of enjambment in “Selma, 1965” create anticipation. Being a poem about a nonviolent demonstration, a tone of anticipation speaks to the larger context of the freedom and equality for which the marchers are marching.
Simile
A simile in poetry is a figure of speech that compares two unlike things using “like” or “as.” House uses a simile in Line 18 when she compares the marchers to a “ripped hem hanging like a train” (Line 18). A train in clothing is a long back portion of a robe or dress. However, in “Selma, 1965,” the marchers are described as a hem that’s been ripped, and they’re “standing indignantly” (Line 17) as they resemble a train. Much of the language used in the latter half of “Selma, 1965” has to do with clothing (“tattered” [Line 15]; “denim frames” [Line 19]) and this simile is no exception. By describing the marchers as a ripped hem, as a train falling behind the main piece of clothing, House paints the image of the marchers as a long line of ragged people.
Alternatively, the use of the word “train” (Line 18) could also reference a railway train. When King led the marchers to Montgomery, he led thousands of marchers. Describing the marchers as a train describes the length of their reach and how large the crowd was. They were an extensive line of people with “grey knees” (Line 19) poking through their denim pants preparing to march for days.
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