Read the stanza below from the poem “birmingham sunday” by richard fariña and complete the instruction that follows.

the men in the forest they once asked of me,
how many black berries grew in the blue sea.
and i asked them right back with a tear in my eye.
how many dark ships in the forest?

analyze the way in which fariña uses figurative language and sensory imagery to stir the reader’s emotions and create meaning in this stanza.

The stanza is an example of extended metaphor. It is interesting that the lines are unchanged from the original song from which the melody for “Birmingham Sunday” is taken. In this metaphor, the “men in the forest” seemed awfully concerned about the “black berries.” At the same time, the speaker, “with a tear” in his or her eye, asks about the “dark ships.” Although this stanza can be taken many different ways, I think it is a metaphor for the fear that people feel for things they do not understand. The men in the forest are scared of things they don’t know from the Blue Sea, while the speaker (who seems to be from the Blue Sea based on the question posed) is fearful of the dark ships in the forest. In this way, the extended metaphor is speaking about the fear that races have of each other and the meaninglessness of that fear. Just as the “black berries” or “dark ships” mean nothing to us, race shouldn’t mean anything when evaluating the worth of a person.

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