jasper texas 1998

This poem has no consistent meter, reflecting the speaker’s informal speech. By having varying stresses and line lengths, Clifton creates extemporaneity—the head’s thoughts seem to be coming to him without design. The lack of strong stresses means that words gain emphasis from their specificity and power, rather than from their position.

The poem consists of three stanzas. The first two stanzas are composed of five lines each, while the final stanza has six lines. By adding one more line, Clifton suggests that the speaker is finding his voice and speaking more confidently. Moreover, its outlier status gives this additional line extra emphasis. The speaker’s frustration and anger serve as a call to action for the reader of the poem. Simply “sing[ing] we shall overcome” (Line 13) is not enough in the face of such violence.

The poem’s first person point of view, using first-person pronouns, is a key feature of the poem. However, the speaker is not the murdered man himself, nor his ghost. Instead, the speaker is Byrd’s decapitated head. Choosing to give a voice to a now inanimate object is a sort of