The Bean Eaters Poem Analysis

Throughout history, poets proactively encouraged other citizens to overcome circumstances that might inhibit their potential success by instilling an optimistic and tenacious mindset. Moreover, the eloquent poet, Belachew Gelahun, desires to encourage individuals that not only reside in Ethiopia, but also to anyone who lives in a country which is experiencing economic turmoil, prejudice and/or financial crisis, to develop realistic ambitions and build self-confidence through the power of literature. Likewise, Gelahun’s poem “I envy” thematically expresses how an adverse mentality can make improving one’s life satisfaction nearly impossible and correlates with Ethiopian citizens’ difficulty to generate happiness when enduring the harsh effects

At this point of the poem, the audience’s inference of the narrator’s lack of wealth gains credibility as ‘The Bean Eaters’ theme is the crippling effect of poverty has on happiness. Moreover, the “casual consumption” (Gelahun, line 17) of an inexpensive and bland food such as beans and the characters’ inability to purchase a shelter with a “front” (Gelahun, line 24) demonstrates how poverty can cause life to be mundane and more grueling. Remarkably, the narrator’s tone gradually becomes more envious throughout the rest of the poem, likely due to the fact that whilst idolizing the woman’s story, the narrator unintentionally forced himself to recognize the amount of difference in writing skill between himself and the woman and consequently induced more negative emotions. Unfortunately, the narrator does not gain any closure when the poem reaches its conclusion and once again laments about his lack of intelligence, which further verifies the lack of character development the character

Although the narrator arguably acquires feasible reasons for his inactivity, his apathy towards improving his lifestyle and envious mindset prohibited him from achieving any relief from his dissatisfaction and thus forced the audience to perceive the narrator in an unfavorable light. While the narrator’s detailed analysis of the woman’s literary work, ‘The Bean Eaters’, successfully conveyed his love for literature and the literary work of the black woman, it did not excuse him for his deficient mentality and lack of proactivity. Consequently, the lack of character development made the conclusion of the poem even more disappointing since the narrator was in a worse state of mind in contrast to the beginning of the poem. At least in the introduction the narrator was scrutinizing his self-purpose rather than deploring his current level of