I Wake Up This Morning Analysis

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Niyi Osundare wrote the poem ‘I wake up this morning’ to tell the general public, some of the negative thing that people who are in authority in the society do and how they mysteriously use all sort of means to cover their bad and shameful deeds. He uses sounds and imagery to broadcast his message to the public. Also he uses themes that reflect on some of the negative societal issues such as social and political corruption, oppression suffered by the masses and mismanagement of societal resources. The poem has an irregular stanza and rhyme scheme. From the first stanza, he portrays the use of auditory imagery. He describes ‘waking up’ as an incident that occurs in the morning. Also, ‘Morning’ marks a new beginning. Line 3 and 4 further emphasizes auditory imagery by making readers picture the ‘youthful breeze’ and wavering nature of leaves that make a whoosh sound to the effect of the…show more content…
This is evident when he writes ‘I wear courage like a shield’ (‘like a shield’ is an example of simile). He further talks about his sovereignty and boldness to pass judgement on and speak against the wrong doings in the society and how disgusting they are to him. This is evident from line 3, when he place emphasis on the letter ‘p’ in the alliterated words ‘pour poison’. The village stream in line 4 is associated with life. He repeats ‘I wear courage like a shield’ in the fifth stanza to place more emphasis on how he will continue to expose all the dirty things associated with people in power(rulers). In order to show how serious his concern is, that he will never grow tired to speak against the disgusting deeds of those in power, he repeats this same words in the sixth stanza. He does this by further creating both auditory and visual imagery in this stanza. This is evident when he writes ‘I shout mountains of distance’. He also uses the word daunting to show how overwhelmed he

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