Margaret Walker was an African American poet and writer who wrote on a level comparable to such well-known names as yesterday’s Langston Hughes or today’s Gwendolyn Brooks, but her name is often not recognized outside of academic circles. Coming out of the oppressed South into the North for her university education, she was unique among her peers in that she had received a quality education from her earliest days from parents who both understood its importance in lifting their daughter out of the poverty of many of their neighbors.
Although she had always been privileged enough to live a middle class lifestyle, she never forgot the stories of her grandmothers, who had lived in the same house with her as a child, and remained forever connected with the major issues that were faced by those of her race. In 1942, Margaret Walker wrote a poem she called “Lineage.” The poem seems relatively simple, consisting of two stanzas, and discusses the activities of the poet’s grandmothers working in the fields as slaves of the old South.
However, Walker’s poetry is never simple, containing as it does multiple layers of nuance to convey her ideas. “Her father had taught her the essential elements of the poem: pictures, music, and most importantly, meaning. The Southern landscape of her youth and the vivid narratives of her grandmother provide the imagery for her writings. Her sense of rhythm is attributed to her mother’s musical expertise and the meaning comes from her father’s philosophy” (Board of Regents, 2006).
The poem talks about the activities of these grandmothers in a sensitive way that depicts them both as caring and loving women as well as strong and hard-working laborers. Walker manages to convey these ideas through her careful application of perspective, her complex use of meter, her careful employment of anaphora and her subtle use of alliteration.
The perspective of the poem is consistently delivered from a first-person narrative point of view, but this point of view shifts in its tense which helps to establish meaning on a number of levels. The first stanza is written in the past tense and includes some of the major themes that characterize Walker’s poetry. For example, “Walker focuses on the culinary arts … not only to celebrate the nurturing acts of black women but also to dramatize the way in which slavery corrupts basic human values” (Graham 237).
Although the grandmothers “moved through fields sowing seed” (3) and “touched earth and grain grew” (4), both activities associated strongly with gaining food for the family, there are no points within this stanza that they are actually brought into direct contact with the final fruits of their labor. Instead of food, “they were full of sturdiness and singing” (5) which made them stronger at some time in their past. This perspective also allows the speaker to establish an immediate connection with her readers or listeners. According to Maryemma Graham (cited in Staff, 2009), “Walker believed that poetry was not confined to academic spaces” (Staff, 2009) and this kind of address made her words seem more welcoming as she invites her reader into her world and her memories.
The second stanza shifts into the present tense, at least at first. This shift occurs as the poet informs the reader “My grandmothers are full of memories” (7). Although yesterday they sweated and toiled in the fields, today they are older women and now smell “of soap and onions and wet clay” (8). This line illustrates that their conditions in life have changed dramatically, as the life the speaker has lived to this point has been vastly different from her grandmothers’ experiences.
Now they are always clean as indicated by the smell of the soap, they are always directly related with actual food in the association with onions and their involvement with wet clay indicates they are still busy, but busy on their own time as this comes last rather than first. In spite of all they have been through, though, they “have many clean words to say” (10), indicating a peaceful and content existence. At this point, the author shifts back into past tense again as she restates her belief in the strength of her grandmothers. This shift in perspective jars the reader into taking a closer look at what the poet intends within the lines of her poem.
One of the first things the reader will look at in taking this closer look will be to determine the meter of the poem to decide how this affects the emotional content of the poem. Although Walker doesn’t use an established meter all the way through her poem, she is conscious of her beat. A composer using her work as inspiration said, “Margaret Walker came from a musical family,” composer Randy Klein said. “You can hear the musical meter when you read her poems.
These poems were crying out to be set to music and not just spoken” (Randy Klein cited in Staff, 2009). Her intelligent use of meter can truly be discovered through a careful analysis of her lines. The first line contains only three stressed beats, which is a pattern repeated in the last two lines of the first stanza and the last two lines of the second stanza. These lines are distinguished from the other lines of the poem that have differing beats. The remaining lines in the first stanza are each given four stresses, with the second line even drifting into the sing-song pattern of iambic to evoke a sense of nostalgia, although the pattern is broken in the following lines.
The second stanza follows a similar but different pattern to the first. It starts with four stresses given to the first line followed by three lines of five stressed beats each, the first of which drifts toward the iambic mode which is broken by the final two beats in the line. The harmony of rhyme is only introduced briefly in the second stanza as the poet rhymes ‘clay’ with ‘say’, bringing emphasis to these two words perhaps as a means of emphasizing the difference between the disharmony of the past and the lack of autonomous action as compared to the harmony of today as the power to govern individual actions is given to the individual.
Walker uses a technique known as anaphora to bring forward specific concepts in her poem. “The term ‘anaphora’ comes from the Greek word for ‘a carrying up or back,’ and refers to a type of parallelism created when successive phrases or lines begin with the same words, often resembling a litany” (Poetic Techniques, 1997). This is most obvious in her use of the phrase ‘my grandmothers.’ It is found in the first and last line of the first stanza and the first and second to last line of the second stanza.
Walker also uses the pronoun ‘they’ to refer to these same grandmothers at the beginning of every line in the first stanza that does not expressly name them and uses this same pronoun once in the second stanza as a means of referring back to them again. This use constantly calls one’s attention back to the idea of the older grandmothers and the life they have lived, emphasizing that the actions being described were not carried out by the author but by ‘they’ who were once slaves and are now free and working towards the better life of their children and grandchildren.
However, the term anaphora has a larger reach than the simple repetition of words. “In contemporary linguistics, [anaphora] is commonly used to refer to a relation between two linguistic elements, wherein the interpretation of one (called in anaphor) is in some way determined by the interpretation of the other (called an antecedent)” (Huang 1). While the majority of the poem is largely interpreted to refer to the author’s grandmothers specifically, the way in which she uses the term, as well as the interruptions in the meter as has already been discussed, throws the meaning of the term ‘grandmother’ into a broader context, encompassing all of the grandmothers of the race.
Throughout all the discord and difficulty, Walker ties her poem together with the subtle use of alliteration to keep the reader moving along. “Alliteration is a figure of emphasis that occurs through the repetition of initial consonant letters (or sounds) in two or more different words across successive sentences, clauses, or phrases” (Eldenmuller, 2001). This technique first appears in the third line as the grandmothers are seen ‘sowing seed’. The ‘s’ sound has a very soothing, calming element to it that is almost immediately banished by the harsher and more active ‘g’ sound of ‘grain grew’ found in the fourth line of the poem.
This is again soothed with the repeating ‘s’s of the grandmothers’ ‘sturdiness and singing’ found in the next line. “Alliteration can be graceful … It can be audacious … It can be elegant … It can amplify the emotional power of a great idea” (Baker, 2004). The last instance of alliteration found in the poem is in the second stanza as she talks about the veins ‘rolling roughly’, introducing a new sound to the poem that has the tendency to suggest smooth motion rather than the bumpy ride of a harsher consonant.
This pattern of soothing, moving, soothing and moving speaks to the pattern of life experienced by the entire race as they have made their way into a greater equality in the modern world. Margaret Walker’s poetry “melts away time and place and unifies black listeners. It’s power is as compelling now as it was sixty-odd years ago when it was written, perhaps more so as we have experienced repeatedly the flood tide and the ebb tide of hope” (Graham 99). The combination of alliterative elements, ending as it does in a softer sound of motion, also suggests progression in the quality of life lived by these grandmothers that has perhaps made their granddaughter more comfortable, but has had the additional effect of making her less strong.
As it is revealed in the poem, then, Walker is able to evoke a sense of profound history, strong suffering, endurance and eventual contentment that is at once the goal and the reduction of the race. “In ‘Lineage,’ [Walker] realizes that she lacks the strength of her grandmothers who, even though they stoop and follow plows, are robust women who bring the land to fruition. Moreover, the emotional strength of their singing complements that of their bodies, and their uttering ‘clean words’ implies a wisdom consisting of moral truth and its practical application in daily affairs. By admitting that she lacks her grandmothers’ strength, the speaker acknowledges these women as role models” (Allego, 1997).
The grandmothers are strong enough to endure extreme hardship, they are capable of bringing forth life out of the dirt of the land and they are mentally durable enough to cope with these things through the release of their singing and their present day ability to speak with ‘clean words,’ all of which seem out of reach to the new generation growing up in often greater comfort if only because they are autonomous, have greater education and greater ability to speak their minds.
Walker further manages to link all of these ideas to the actual experience of the people as she encompasses them in her memories, joins them in the pattern of their lives and sympathizes with them in the interrupted rhythms of social progress. She does this with her masterful use of many of the tools and techniques of poetry such as meter, anaphora and alliteration that serve to link the poem with the sounds and patterns of life of black people while also reinforcing connections within the cultural history and experience of their lives and the lives of their ancestors.
References
Allego, Donna. “Margaret Walker: Biographical Note.” The Construction and Role of Community in Political Long Poems by Twentieth-Century American Women Poets. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, 1997. Web.
Baker, Bob. “Poetry of Popular Patter.” Los Angeles Times. (2004). Web.
Board of Regents. “Margaret Abigail Walker Alexander.” Voices from the Gaps. University of Minnesota, 2006. Web.
Eldenmuller, Michael E. “Alliteration.” Rhetorical Figures in Sound. American Rhetoric. (2001). Web.
Graham, Maryemma. Fields Watered with Blood. University of Georgia Press, 2001. Web.
Huang, Yan. Anaphora: A Cross-Linguistic Approach. Oxford University Press, 2000. Web.
“Poetic Techniques.” Poets.org. Academy of American Poets. (1997). Web.
Staff. “Unique Musical Performance Highlights Poetry of Margaret Walker.” InfoZine. Kansas City. (2009). Web.