Sare or Sorry

The poem describes a young black girl who wants to participate in a freedom march. The freedom march is a demonstration of how blacks want to be treated equally with everyone else in the world. They want to share all of the same privileges and advantages whites have and that is why the march symbolizes freedom which blacks desired to achieve. For this reason, they are marching together as one to achieve this long awaited goal.

The little girl asks her mother numerous times to allow her to attend the freedom march and each time her mother responds by saying, “NO”. She doesn’t want her baby to get hurt by guns being fired off by those who are protesting the freedom march. The individuals that arrest protestors can be white police officers who strongly disagree with those who are protesting in the freedom march. She says, “No, baby, no, you may not go/, For the

dogs are fierce and wild/, And clubs and hoses, guns and jail/ Aren’t good for a little child.”(lines, 5-8) The line, No, baby, no, you may not go, (line, 5) which is used twice in this poem is an example of alliteration. The line, For the dogs are fierce and wild (line, 6) is a metaphor, the author actually is saying that those who protest the freedom march are fierce and wild individuals who are out to physically hurt those who are participants of the march.

The poem is very ironic. The mother begs and pleads with her child to go to church when all along the girl wanted to attend the freedom march. The mother preaches to her child how the freedom march is not a place for little children to be. She would feel at ease if her child were at church, for church was a safe place to be. Her child would be easily out of harm’s way. The white gloves which the little girl placed on her hands and the white shoes she placed on her feet symbolize purity. The child is being dressed for her death. She is like an angel floating up to heaven. Little did she know that by sending her baby to church would result in her death. Instead of acting at the freedom march, the protestors decide to bomb the church where the little girl had been told by her mother to go. If the child went to the freedom march she would have been safe, well, and alive. The poem is ironic in the sense that church has always been a safe place, but in

Some topics in this essay:
Birmingham Alabama, Dudley Randall, freedom march, , little girl, march mother, attend freedom march, child church, church safe, attend freedom, protesting freedom march, freedom march mother, line 5, protesting freedom, fierce wild, “no baby, child freedom march,