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    The Clothes

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    vuyaniblanket
    The poem describes the clothes of a dead freedom fighter hanging on a line after being washed. The clothes are symbolic of the intense suffering the man endured fighting apartheid in South Africa. The analysis examines the imagery and metaphors used in the poem to convey the struggle and sacrifice of the freedom fighter.

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    The Clothes

    Uploaded by

    vuyaniblanket
    1K views2 pages
    The poem describes the clothes of a dead freedom fighter hanging on a line after being washed. The clothes are symbolic of the intense suffering the man endured fighting apartheid in South Africa. The analysis examines the imagery and metaphors used in the poem to convey the struggle and sacrifice of the freedom fighter.

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    The poem describes the clothes of a dead freedom fighter hanging on a line after being washed. The clothes are symbolic of the intense suffering the man endured fighting apartheid in South Africa. The analysis examines the imagery and metaphors used in the poem to convey the struggle and sacrifice of the freedom fighter.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    1K views2 pages

    The Clothes

    Uploaded by

    vuyaniblanket
    The poem describes the clothes of a dead freedom fighter hanging on a line after being washed. The clothes are symbolic of the intense suffering the man endured fighting apartheid in South Africa. The analysis examines the imagery and metaphors used in the poem to convey the struggle and sacrifice of the freedom fighter.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    of 2

    BACKGROUND

     Mongane Wally Serote’s poems focus mainly on the resistance and exposure of the
    debilitating effect that apartheid had on the vast majority of the South African population.
     His poem, ‘The Clothes’, is an example of by resistance poetry.
     In the poem, he describes the clothes of a dead comrade who was a freedom fighter.
     The clothes have been washed and left hanging on the line.
     These wet clothes are symbolic of the intense suffering that the dead man had to endure,
    due to both physical and emotional pain.

    Characteristics.

     This narrative poem is a personal account.


     It is rich in imagery and written in free-verse.
     Because of its subject matter, it is an elegy (Death Poem).
     Each of the four stanzas is of a different length.
     Sentence length is also varied, and there is no set rhyme scheme or rhythm.

    Poem Analysis

     In stanza 1 the phrase ‘Dripped water like a window crying dew’ (line 4) makes use of a
    simile.
     The manner in which the water dripped is being compared to a ‘window crying dew’.
     The phrase ‘window crying dew’ is an example of a transferred epithet (personification) as it
    draws a parallel between the act of crying and how dew appears on a window.
     ‘The shoes rested the first time’ (line 5) also uses a transferred epithet and at this point the
    poet gives off the impression that the shoes are tired/exhausted.
     The image ‘Soaked wet with pity’ (line 11) is another example of transferred epithet as it
    attributes emotion to clothing.
     The phrase ‘Wrinkled and crying reddish water’ (line 12), communicates that the

    clothing was red as a result of having been stained by blood.

     In line 13, the speaker portrays a ‘gash’ on the shirt which must have been made

    during a struggle for the freedom fighter’s life.

     The lines that follow the description of the shirt are lives’ perhaps the most evocative in the
    poem.
     ‘And stains that told the few who know / An item of our death-live lives (lines 14-15) imply
    that the slain freedom fighter was a member of a small community of people (‘the few

    who know’) who can understand the meaning of the gash and the stains.

     The image ‘our death-life lives’ (line 15) deserves much more exploration.
     The image ‘colourless jacket’ (line 16) may describe a worn-out jacket that has lost its
    colour.
     The jacket is muddy, showing that the person experienced a struggle and was at some point
    lying on the ground.
     In stanza 5, the phrase ‘over-sized trousers black-striped trousers / Dangled from one hip’
    (lines 19-20) compares the trousers to the way a man would hang if there were a rope
    underneath his head.
     Death by hanging is a common method of executing criminals (especially political criminals)
    or of committing suicide.
     The man may have died as a result of his despair: ‘Tired of hoping to hope’ (line 22) for a
    better society.

    Class Activity

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