Power by Audre Lorde Poem Analysis Essay Sample

The speaker of "Power" speaks in the first person, and she expresses feelings toward a child’s death. She wants to write about the horrific events of the murder, and "Power" is presumably the result of that urge to process her emotions through writing. Throughout the actual poem, however, the speaker reveals little about herself, other than the fact that child’s death is haunting her, preventing her from sleeping at night, and inspiring her to "touch the destruction" inside her and turn it into poetry. Presumably, the speaker herself is Black, as she refers to "our children" when discussing how the Black woman on the jury couldn't protect and other Black victims of police brutality. Throughout the poem, the speaker's feelings seem to grow only more intense, perhaps because she is struggling to describe kid's death and feels increasingly frustrated at her own powerlessness to combat racism and injustice. The poet sometimes uses sudden line breaks to determine the rhythm of the poem, which has no consistent form, meter, or rhyme scheme. At certain moments, Lorde's uses these breaks to dramatize and intensify the tone of the poem. By stopping after the word "kill" (line 2), for example, Lorde leaves the reader in momentary suspense, which only increases with the word "yourself" standing alone on the following line:

is being ready to kill

[themselves]

instead of [the Black] children (line 2-4).

The speaker is talking about self-sacrifice. Moments like these keep the reader engaged, wondering what the speaker really means when she introduces dramatic images. In the second stanza, the lack of punctuation makes the poem flow quickly and breathlessly. Breaks in the middle of clauses—like between "while" and "my" in lines 11 and 12, or between "whiteness" and "of" in lines 15 and 16—make the speaker seem as if she is gasping, stumbling through her words without any capacity to stop:

churns at the imagined taste while

[speaker’s] mouth splits into dry lips

[...]

as it sinks into the whiteness

of the desert where [speaker] [was] lost

In addition to these influences on tone, Lorde uses phrases such as: "justice had been done" (line 33), hinting that the speaker finds this notion unbelievable of course justice hadn't been done when Shea was set free. And in lines 43-44, breaking before the words "within [the speaker]" draws attention back to the speaker's interior self, reminding the reader that she is deeply focused on her emotions and intent on using them to drive her poetry.