Study Guide – Afro-American Fragment and Heaven

Afro-American Fragment
1. What is the speaker’s relationship to Africa? How do you think the feels about that relationship?


2. In the first stanza to what songs do you think the speaker is referring? Explain what you think the speaker is talking about in lines 6-9.


3. What is the “song” the speaker refers to in the second stanza? What does this “song” seem to symbolize, or stand for?


4. Evaluate how repetition and rhyme help to convey the poem’s meaning and message.


5. What does the poem’s meaning and message?


6. What place or places have helped shape your own sense of identity?


Heaven
1. Who is the boy the speaker describes in the first stanza? What is his dream?


2. Where does the speaker live? What seems to be her attitude toward this place?


3. Who is the “boy’ introduced in line 24? What did he do and what happened to him?


4. What does China seem to represent to the speaker’s son?


5. What place do you think about or dream of visiting like the speaker’s son thinks about China?