The Use of Irony, Imagery, and Dialogue and Structure in Ballad of Birmingham, a Poem by Dudley Randall
Dudley Randall's "Ballad of Birmingham" is a poem based on the events of the 1963 bombing at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. The poem specifically tells the story of a young girl who instead of wanting to play outside like a "normal kid", wants to participate in a freedom march. Worried for her daughters safety, her mother denies her permission and tells her to go to the church where she will be "safe" instead. Dudley uses irony, imagery and dialogue and structure to induce emotion/sympathy from the audience.
As stated, the poem itself begins with dialogue between the mother and daughter, where she is requesting to attend a freedom march. The mother denies her daughters request and suggests that her daughter attend church and sing in the children's choir as an alternative. Not only does dialogue provide a voice for the characters, but it helps to display emotion within the characters and it gives that "drama effect to a story. This specific exchange between the characters clearly displayed the mothers concern for her daughters safety as well as her daughters strong will and persistence to attend the march. The dialogue also does a good job of exposing the violence that occured during this time. An in text example of this is in the first stanza where her mother says "For the dogs are fierce and wild, And clubs and hoses, guns and jails"; this symbolized the brutality of the police officers during the time. The poem has 8 stanzas, and four lines in each stanza. As a ballad, the poem rhymes ABCB and almost follows a beat, making it appear catchy to the reader.
Secondly, the author uses imagery as another tool in this poem. Taking advantage of all your senses, imagery allows for the reader to use their imagination to vividly create images in their mind to help better understand a text. In addition, imagery can help to evoke different emotions within a reader. Visual imagery is used to portray the mothers fear as well as her daughters actions and innocence. The mothers descriptions of the surrounding environment helps us to paint a mental picture in our own minds, and allows us to see how dangerous it was for her daughter to attend the march.
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In addition, the author uses both metaphors and imagery to create a sense of invulnerability in the reader to create this idea of "perfection" and innocence so that the explosion could create a greater impact on the reader. In stanza 5, the young girl is getting dressed in all white as she prepares to go to church. White is a very symbolic color, women wear it for a wedding or people wear it during times of baptism. The color white is a symbol of purity and it represents her innocence. In stanza 7 after the bombing, the only thing her mother is able to recover from the rubble is her daughters white shoe. This imagery is extremely powerful because not only does it hurt the audience as we imagine the pain the mother feels, but it leaves us with the mental picture that she was essentially stripped of her own innocence and childhood.
As we all know, church is and is seen as a safe place for worship. In the case of the poem and the actual events that occured, the church should have been a safe haven away from all of the violence happening around them; this is the grand plot twist of the story. "The mother smiled to know her child was in the sacred place" (line 21). Ironically, Church turns out to be the wrong place to go for the little girl, because the church is where she met her fate and died in the bombing. This is an example of situational irony, the contradiction of an event that occurs which is contrary to the expectations of the characters.
As you can see, the devices Randall used were extremely effective in evoking emotion from the readers. After reading, It makes you think to you think to yourself, if only she had gone to the Freedom March instead of church. But would she have really been safe in either location?
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The Use of Irony, Imagery, and Dialogue and Structure in Ballad of Birmingham, a Poem by Dudley Randall. (2023, Feb 24). Retrieved from https://phdessay.com/the-use-of-irony-imagery-and-dialogue-and-structure-in-ballad-of-birmingham-a-poem-by-dudley-randall/
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