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Claude McKay

Claude McKay . By: Kaylin Parkes. Biography . Real name: Festus Claudius McKay September 15, 1889 – May 22, 1948) Black Jamaican-American p oet and writer McKay became an apprentice to Walter Jekyll who inspired him and suggested he should focus on writing

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Claude McKay

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  1. Claude McKay By: KaylinParkes

  2. Biography • Real name: Festus Claudius McKay • September 15, 1889 – May 22, 1948) • Black Jamaican-American poet and writer • McKay became an apprentice to Walter Jekyll who inspired him and suggested he should focus on writing • Left for the U.S in 1912 to attend Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute • He was unaware of the intense racism, which created ideas for him to write about • Has a legacy of influencing a generation of other black writers

  3. Song Of the moon • The moonlight breaks upon the city's domes, • And falls along cemented steel and stone, • Upon the grayness of a million homes, • Lugubrious in unchanging monotone. • Upon the clothes behind the tenement, • That hang like ghosts suspended from the lines, • Linking each flat to each indifferent, • Incongruous and strange the moonlight shines. • There is no magic from your presence here, • Ho, moon, sad moon, tuck up your trailing robe, • Whose silver seems antique and so severe • Against the glow of one electric globe. • Go spill your beauty on the laughing faces • Of happy flowers that bloom a thousand hues, • Waiting on tiptoe in the wilding spaces, • To drink your wine mixed with sweet drafts of dews.

  4. Poem Explanation • The poem describes this depressing city and how the moon isn’t even able to illuminate the city and brighten it to make the people happy. • There is no magic from your presence here: that means the moon is no use to this city because there is no way it can improve the city, no matter how powerful the moon is. • Thepoem is in first person

  5. Poetic devices • Simile: That hang like ghosts suspended from the lines. • Tone: when talking about the city it’s negative (no magic, grayness, lugubrious, unchanging monotone) • Tone: when talking about the moon it’s positive (antique, beauty, happy flowers that bloom a thousand hues) • Personification: The moonlight breaks upon the city's domes • Personification: Go spill your beauty on the laughing faces • Personification: happy flowers • Hyperbole: Of happy flowers that bloom a thousand hues • Rhyme scheme: A AAA B C D C

  6. Citations • http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/song-of-the-moon/ • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_McKay

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