This poem offers the readers both a lesson on Abraham Lincoln’s downfalls, and a deep insight into the rules and wording of writing. The poem is carefully and well constructed from top to bottom with insights throughout to pinpoint to the readers the main purpose of her work: to show that “everything is in the language that we use”. The author justifies that statement through ways “hidden” throughout the article, and these are a few of my insights into that statement.
What I realize firstly, is her word choices to state her thoughts. In modern language, we only know Minnesota as… Minnesota. However in the poem, she uses prefixes of that word (“Mnisota”) in replacement of the one we know most commonly (“Minnesota”) and continues to use it for the remainder of the poem. (“However, as further consequence, what remained of Dakota territory in Mnisota was dissolved”). To me, this important yet minute detail may be one of the aspects of “everything is in the language that we use”, for we may use any sort of prefix to replace how one states a word or statement, under the condition that it is logically reasonable.
A second, yet broader aspect is the redundancies within the poem. For example: “Why were thirty-eight Dakota men hung?”… is followed by “Why were thirty-eight Dakota men hanged?” These two, in modern language, both make sense. However, to the author, it is the much deeper aspects that differentiates the two. This, to me, also conforms to the statement “everything is in the language that we use”, since like “hang” and “hung” in that sentence, we may use any form of a word to describe something in modern language, with the condition that it is understandable.
I enjoy how you picked up on the idea that Minnesota was spelled differently, but hoped that you would go more into detail as to why you think the author did that and why you think the author did that in the place that she did. I love how you used the hung and hanged reference and alluded it to modern day.
I first want to start out by saying that I love how you position the centralized concept of “everything is in the language that we use” into a compact and organized thesis statement. That’s something I was not able to do, only building up to the point later on in my response. One particularity that stands out is how your examples (main points of the above mentioned thesis) start on the surface level, but eventually venture into deeper waters. I made it a point to do the same, and while we both mentioned the “Mnisota” discourse as the more obvious choice for a surface level example, we contrastingly find “deeper examples” in different areas of the poem. The fact that two pieces of analytical writing can lead to similar conclusions in regards to the central idea, but require differing methods to obtain such, is a resounding testament to the complexity and depth of Long Soldier’s “38”. Great work 🙂
I love how you addressed these quotes, “Why were thirty-eight Dakota men hung? followed by “Why were thirty-eight Dakota men hanged?”. I agree with your response to this part of the poem, because to us in the modern language they both make perfect sense. But to Soldier these two different sentences each have very different meanings, especially considering the point she is trying to convey.