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...... Yet Nelson deploys this European form for her uniquely American political and personal poetic purposes, to discuss the uniquely American legacy of Black-White relations. Bluntly, Nelson says: The sonnet form was originally a poetic form that was used to declare love, and love poems very often use flowers as a symbol of romance. What I wanted to do is to turn around that tradition and describe something really beautiful in the form that is traditionally related to love, and I wanted to use the language of flowers to describe something horrible, much like the flowers of Ophelia are used to crown the young womans horrific death (Pinkney, 2005, p.2). Emmett Till did not die for love; rather he was murdered because of the color of his skin before his time, while he was still a child
In the images used in Nelsons poetic sequence, the tree is not merely an object of beauty and floral communication, as it was for the Elizabethans, but a reference to the earlier African-American poetic tradition of Paul Lawrence Dunbar, who wrote poetry about how African-Americans were hung upon trees while they were, lynched (Pinkney, 2005, p.2). The crown of sonnets that the poet

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