The reading of the poem “Discourse on the Logic of Language” provided great context to Frederick Douglass’s autobiography and gains a lot of strength after reading about his life. The beginning of the poem starts with the repetition and breakdown of the word language as the poem describes the separation between father and mother language. The narrator states that the mother’s  language is the native language while the father’s is the foreign language in between repeated rephrasing of language to sound like land, anguish, and other similar words. This brings a lot of emotional weight to the parts in the biography where Douglass states that he was separated from his mother when he was a baby and had very little contact with her. This part of the poem also shows the rejection and rage he feels about his “Father’s language” due to the fact he never knew his father except from rumors that it was a white man, possibly the slave master, which makes his father apart of the group that took advantage of slaves.

The part where the mother blows her words into the child’s mouth and the fact the mother language is the home language could be a emotional reflection of the fact that that children born of slaves were deemed slaves and treated as such. This fact in the autobiography also plays into the poem because later on the poem states “english is my mother tongue, my father tongue” showing that, even though he has his roots in America, he is treated as an other. Another big moment in the poem is the test questions proposed. One asking what was the tongue’s primary use and one answer was “the principle organ of oppression and exploitation” which brings to mind the slave handler that would use many a horrid slur any time he yelled or wiped the slaves. This poem seems to me a stark contrast to the book due to one reason. In the book, Douglass goes about describing his life in the institution of slavery in great detail and relating it to the lives all slaves must face while the poem is just pure emotion and sting of consciousness.