Between the World and Me

Content Warning: This section of the guide features references to racially-motivated violence and murder, specifically lynching.

Stanza 1 (Lines 1-3)

The first three lines of the poem act as a prelude to what follows. The speaker is on the brink of discovering something startling, perhaps shocking, without yet giving any clue as to what it might be. The poem starts in a pleasant manner, with the speaker taking a walk in the woods on a sunny morning. However, this will turn out to be no normal walk. Whatever he is about to uncover happens quite by accident; he “stumbled suddenly” and comes “upon the thing” (Line 1). This strikes an ominous note—the threat of what the thing could be is amplified by the word “guarded” (Line 2) to refer to the trees that surround the grass clearing in the woods. As the reader questions what is being “guarded” (Line 2), the poem builds toward something great unfolding, and the reader’s unease about it is also stirred up by the phrase “sooty details” (Line 3).

Although it is a grave thing that he must relate, the speaker adopts a clever, storyteller’s introduction, or prelude, which grabs the reader’s attention and ensures that he or she reads on. As part of this approach, the speaker explains, before he describes the scene, the effect it had on him. The details rise, “thrusting themselves between the world and me” (Line 3). When the speaker then explains, in the following stanzas, what he discovered in that grass clearing, it transpires he was traumatized by what he saw; it affected the way he thought and felt about everything, complicating his perceptions of life. In that transformative moment, fear entered his being at a deep level as he became aware of the cruel reality of the society he lives in.

Stanza 2 (Lines 4-10)

This stanza gives a full description of what the speaker sees, and it is immediately apparent what he has stumbled upon: The tell-tale remains of the lynching of a Black man. The horror of the scene is readily apparent. The stump of the sapling, “pointing a blunt finger accusingly at the sky” (Line 5), seems to be either holding God responsible for failing to prevent the killing or perhaps imploring God to take revenge on the killers. The debris left by the lynch mob, which was made up of women and men (as the reference to “a whore’s lipstick” [Line 8] shows), reveals that the perpetrators were smoking and drinking, eating peanuts, and having a good time. This presents a stark contrast to the description of the remains of the dead man’s clothing in the previous line, especially the “trousers stiff with black blood” (Line 7). Line 9 reveals more grisly details: tar, feathers, and the smell of gasoline. Tarring and feathering is an old, ritual form of punishment. The victim was stripped, and tar—often hot tar—was poured over them. Feathers were then thrown at them or they were rolled in a pile of feathers that then stuck in the tar. The aim was to publicly humiliate but not to kill. Tarring and feathering was a form of vigilante justice or revenge. It was common in medieval Europe and was also used in British North American colonies from 1766 to 1776. Sometimes it was used as part of a lynching in the American South. In the lynching described in the poem, the “lingering smell of gasoline” (Line 10), along with the earlier “charred stump” (Line 2) and “burnt leaves” (Line 3) indicates that after being tarred and feathered, the victim was set on fire.

Stanza 3 (Lines 11-15)

This stanza describes the speaker’s reaction to what he sees, and it begins to explain the phrase from the first stanza, about how the scene interposed itself “between the world and me” (Line 3). The speaker is enveloped by both pity and fear; the imagery is of coldness: his “mind was frozen within cold pity” (Line 11), and his heart was “circled by icy walls of fear” (Line 12). The experience overwhelms him; the desolate scene, so evocative of injustice, pain, and death, comes alive for him in a very literal way. He hears and sees it all in his mind’s eye and in his whole being, and he becomes one with the victim as the “dry bones” seem to come alive and melt “into my bones” (Line 14). The reference to “dry bones” (Line 14) echoes a famous passage in the Old Testament book of Ezekiel in which God guides the prophet Ezekiel to a valley that is full of dry bones. The Lord says to him, “Shall these bones live?” (King James Bible, Chapter 37, Verse 3), and in Wright’s poem, they do just that, revivified by the extraordinary empathy of the speaker.

Stanza 4 (Lines 16-17)

The perspective of the speaker continues to expand. As he starts to become the victim, he also perceives the entire scene, as if it were actually going on in the present moment. He sees a thousand faces urging that he be set alight and killed. The number may sound like an exaggeration but some lynch mobs were indeed that large, although it might be unlikely in this woodsy setting.

The speaker now fully identifies with the dead man; he cannot distinguish between the victim and himself, referring to the faces that “swirled around me,” demanding “my life” (Line 17). By this point he has completely lost his usual sense of self as this searing reality from the recent past suddenly arises and takes him over, creating a barrier “between the world and me” (Line 3); this is all he can see and experience at the moment.

Stanza 5 (Lines 18-25)

The intimate, complete identification of speaker and victim continues in the final stanza. The words “my” or “me” occur 15 times and the word “I” five times. The poem becomes, in effect, a first-person narration of a deadly lynching in all its terrifying, raw, as-it-happens physical detail. The description also contains ironic references to religious language of mercy and baptism, as in “my blood was cooled mercifully, cooled by a baptism of gasoline” (Line 22). Finally, after the speaker experiences for himself the moment-by-moment agony of the death of the lynched man, he becomes the “dry bones” (Line 25) on the ground, lifeless, just as they were before they came alive in him. Yet in a recasting of the image that first appeared in Stanza 2, it is still his own face that stares out from the “stony skull” (Line 25), an image that is made eerie by the shaft of sunlight penetrating the eye sockets, giving them a grotesque appearance that cruelly mimics the light in the eyes of a living person.