Memory By Margaret Walker

Who is Margaret Walker? Margaret Walker was a poet who wrote five bibliography poems (Poetry Foundation). Margaret Walker wrote more poems but these are just the ones she wrote about her life. She leaned toward writing about nature and black lives, she addresses these things in the poems “Sorrow Home”, “ Memory”, and “Southern Song”, most people can relate to these types of poems because they can relate to being outdoors and doing hard work and putting forth the effort to get a job done. Margaret Walker was an interesting poet because her poems can transport the reader back to a time and place of hardships and struggles of the black community in the days of slavery and their strength to overcome these sometimes unbearable conditions.

Walker was looking back on her life in the big, busy city of Chicago. This poem also uses imagery because it uses the sense sight. The reason why is because Margaret Walker wanted the reader to be able to visualize what she was seeing. People can see people on a rainy or snowy nights and trying to stay warm by covering their heads. This poem was mainly about poor and unhappy people (Poetry Unit). When a lot of people read this they might think about the Great Depression, the reason why they might think about this is because people did not have jobs they did not have a lot to eat and they were unhappy and poor people. Margaret Walker lived through the Great Depression and most people would say that’s where she got her inspiration. She is observing them from a perspective that is detached in a hard time. The image of the people bowed under their “shabby felts and parasols” tells the reader that they are physically depleted this is also telling the reader that they could be in a mentally, emotionally and spiritually depressed state ( Gale Contextual). Another main point is that is darkness and bitterness of the poem, the poem is very bitter because of the depressed state of mind (Bio of