18 pages • 36 minutes read
The Tradition
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Rhyme and Meter
“The Tradition” is a free verse poem, meaning it does not follow a fixed rhyme-scheme or a metrical pattern. Two irregularities in Brown’s free verse are worth noting. First, though the poem does not follow a fixed rhyme-scheme, the last word of Line 13 rhymes with the last word of Line 14. Thus, “The Tradition” ends on a rhyming couplet:
Where the world ends, everything cut down
John Crawford. Eric Garner. Mike Brown (Lines 13-14).
This encourages the reader to pay special attention to these two lines.
Second, even though the poem does not follow a fixed metrical pattern, Brown’s verse is more regular than others of its genre. All fourteen lines of “The Tradition” are very close to the same metrical length (approximately 10 syllables long).
These poetic details reinforce the poem’s themes. By definition, a tradition is regular, because it is an inherited and well-established pattern of belief and behavior. Thus, the repeated sounds on the last two lines (“down” and “Brown”) and the regularity of the poem’s line lengths fit well with its content, which is highly concerned with pattern and repetition.
Form
“The Tradition” is a sonnet. A traditional English sonnet is a 14-line poem typically written in iambic pentameter that follows the rhyme-scheme abab cdcd efef gg. Modern poets, however, have pushed the traditional confines of the sonnet. Nowadays, many poems that are 14 lines long are considered sonnets, regardless of whether they are metered or rhymed. Some poems which are close to—but not exactly—fourteen lines are considered sonnets, too.
“The Tradition” is exactly fourteen lines. As mentioned in the Rhyme and Meter section, Brown’s poem does not follow a fixed rhyme-pattern, but it does end the same way a traditional English sonnet ends: a rhyming couplet. Brown’s poem also includes the single most important element of an English sonnet: the volta. Italian for “turn,” volta is the point in which the poem’s thought or argument changes trajectory. The volta in “The Tradition” happens in the same place as it would in a traditional English sonnet, between Lines 12 and 13. At this point, “The Tradition” changes gears—the first twelve lines are about flowers, but the last two lines are about the murders of Black men by police officers.
Brown chose the sonnet, a very traditional form, for his poem about tradition. In this way, the poem’s form and the content work together. But just as Brown encourages the rejection of a tradition that murders Black men, so the poet rejects a purely traditional poetic form. Traditional English sonnets are typically written in iambic pentameter, meaning there are five iambs (an iamb is a two-syllable foot where an unstressed syllable is followed by a stressed syllable) per line. Brown’s poem has about 10 syllables per line (so, in terms of length, all of Brown’s lines are very close to the lines of a traditional English sonnet). Brown, however, doesn’t follow the iambic pattern of the traditional sonnet—quite the opposite. Twelve of Brown’s fourteen lines begin with a stressed (rather than an unstressed) syllable (all lines but Line 6 and Line 7). Brown’s refusal to adhere to the metrical pattern of a traditional sonnet is appropriate for a poem that critiques the status quo. Brown’s poem opposes the traditional metrical pattern of a sonnet, rather than accepting it.
Unlock all 18 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features:
Related Titles
By Jericho Brown
