I cannot believe that we are so close to the end of the semester. The time passed so quickly, didn’t it? It was a very interesting and challenging semester for me. I remember we discussed in class a few weeks ago what is a good essay. Also, I remember saying that a good essay is when the writer truly cares what she or he writes about. This is what led me to write about Lorde’s poem because there are still injustices in our society that people should stand up to fearlessly. For my final essay I picked the poem “Power” by Audre Lorde. For some reason it caught my attention from the very first time I read the poem. I am still in the process of polishing up my final paper. The meaning behind the poem pushed me into thinking about the problems that the society faced at the time when the poem was written, the 1960s.
Overall the final essay was a very challenging, but mostly interesting project. I still have a couple of days to finish the paper and make it as good as possible. To me this paper was challenging because I had to look beyond the meaning of words and sort of read “in between the lines” what the author was trying to say through the poem. Audre Lorde believed that the purpose of her poems in general was to “give name to the nameless so it can be thought”. Indeed, the main purpose of any poem is to give a base to contemplate its implicit meaning behind the words. In the poem “Power”, for instance, the author calls people to stand up against abuse of power in the society at the time. Through horrifying examples the author makes the readers face boldly the reality of injustices instead of keeping silent.
I have to admit that it was also a very interesting project because after doing a careful research on the subject matter I saw a couple of different reviews by critics who commonly agreed that the abuse of power ends when people will not settle for silence. Ultimately, it took decades for people to see the clear meaning of Lorde’s poetry. However her goals as an author and civil rights activist were achieved because the public faced the fears of unjust society from the past and refused to remain silent any more. The time to speak for the majority of people began. People realized and learned that with the power in their hands they can only make a difference together.