Poetry

2 Pages 578 Words

When it comes to poetry there are a few things that make poems stick out and stay fresh in people’s minds. Three of these things are diction, tone, and theme. Diction is the way that the author wrote uses his or her words in the piece. Tone is kind of difficult to put into words. Some people get tone and diction confused because they both have to do with word usage. However, tone is how the words are used to create a certain mood in the poem. Theme is simply what the poem is about. These are three important things to look at in all poems. Those are the three things that will be discussed about “Johannesburg Mines” by Langston Hughes.
The diction in this poem seems to be pretty basic. The way the author “talks” in this poem is very clear. It is not hard to stay with the words, and not often will the reader stumble on reading this selection. For one, this is not a long poem and the words are very simple. This is a poem that a third grader would be able to read, maybe not understand but read. The most difficult word is “Johannesburg” and that can be read phonetically. Overall, this is an easy poem to read.
Diction is important, and it sort of similar to tone. Tone is the mood created from the words used in the selection. The tone that comes from this poem is one where the author seems to be angered at the fact that there are 240,000 native Africans working in the Johannesburg mines. It seems to be that Langston Hughes is making some sort of political statement with this poem. After reading this poem, I was not enraged, but a small rush of anger came over me. It was as if the tone that Langston had in this poem was transferred to me. I felt what Langston was talking about, what kind of poem could be made from the slave labor of 240,000 native Africans working in a mine? Not only did it make me think of the Africans in the mine but the other African Americans and black people all over the world that are...