Poem Presentation: Sherbet

 As one of the class assignments, I made a presentation about a poem "Sherbet".

*You can read it here!

About the Author

This poem was written by Cornelius Eady who was born in Rochester, New York and is an author of seven volumes of poetry. In most of Eady’s poems, there is a musical quality drawn from the Blues and Jazz. Also, he centers on family life, violence, and societal problems stemming from questions of race and class.

His poetry is often praised for its simple and approachable language. 

In this poem, certainly, it is true that many of the words used in this poem seem to be simple. This makes it easy to understand, but at the same time, it makes you think about the meaning of the words.

About the Poem

The title of this poem, and the food it is based on, is sherbet.

The title and motif of the poem is sherbet, a frozen confection made by adding sugar, fruit juice, or acid, and may contain milk fat or milk solids.

In English-speaking countries, the word "sherbet" is polysemous and refers to ice cream (United States) or bursting candy (United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia).

About the Words used in the poem

Now let's get back to the explanation of the poem.

First, let's talk about black and white. This refers to the color of the skin, as in black man, white wife. The author is an African-American, and this poem is about racial issues, which is one of his styles.

Next, let's talk about the name of the place, Richmond, Virginia. This is the place where the capital of the American Confederacy, founded in 1861 during the Civil War, was located. This war was fought between the North, which supported the abolition of slavery, and the South, which advocated the continuation of slavery, and we can see that these are historically important place names in the American black issues.

Next, let's look at the sentence "the end of- dispute, a group of islands, ouor side, the fence". The next sentence, "the end of- dispute," uses the word "border," which may refer to the Cold War that divided the world into the West and the East. Sorbet is a cold food, and the word "cold" is used to describe the Cold War.

The word "a group" refers to the western and eastern countries, and "our side" may refer to the western countries to which the U.S. belongs. However, since "what do we call the rich" is used, the author may be wondering which principle is more appropriate.

Comments

WhenI read the poem, the image of a black man enjoying an elegant moment in a luxurious hotel while the other white people looked at him coldly came to my mind.

Even with the fight of black and white over, the US still had a problem of Cold War.

I thought that the author tells the problems of America through this poem.

Thaks for reading:)