Analysis of "Ballad of Birmingham"

Thesis: In “Ballad of Birmingham,” the greatest purpose of author Dudley Randall is to make the reader associate himself or herself with the mother in the poem, allowing the reader to gain a sense of empathy for the mother and by extension for the cause of civil rights.

• The use of direct quotations and the repetition within these quotations makes the mother and child relationship known to the reader, invoking feelings that are inherent to such a relationship.
• The child’s use of “mother dear” in the first line instantly allows the reader to understand the child as a child, and to feel the caring emotions that are inherent with children; this is reinforced with the later repetition of “mother” (1, 9).
• The specific repeated use of “baby,” a term of endearment that all mothers use, would allow any parent to understand instantly the worry the mother feels for the child (5, 13).
• The repetition of both of these terms in each quote, including the use of “baby” at the conclusion of the poem, reinforces the feelings that such a relationship creates by consistently referring to the relationships (31).
• The description in the fifth stanza either serves to enhance childlike innocence, causing the loss to seem even greater, or to emphasize the mother’s love for the child, depending on the interpretation of “she,” which refers ambiguously to either the mother or the child.
• If “she” is interpreted as the child, then an image appears of a child dressing up for church, enhancing the feelings of innocence that come inherently with children with the purity that comes with church, amplified by the use of “white” to describe her gloves and shoes (19-20).
• If “she” is interpreted as the mother, then the image becomes one of a mother carefully brushing her daughter’s hair, then dressing her up, kneeling down to the child’s height to do so; this image of a mother kneeling in front of her child to tenderly put on her gloves is a scene that could characterize the love between the mother and the child and thus act as an almost holy image that is shattered by the bomb at the end of the poem.
• The ambiguity causes one who looks sufficiently closely at the poem to see the ambiguity to see both of these images with similar effects, and even in one who simply reads over the poem sees, to a lesser extent, the image that doesn't correlate with his or her interpretation of "she," despite that the reader didn't actually understand the ambiguity as ambiguous.