“Teacher” by Langston Hughes has sixteen lines and four stanzas. While the poem is certainly lyrical, it is irregularly paced with an overall rhyme scheme of “abcb,” Hughes divides the 16 lines into four quatrains, or four four-line stanzas. Enjambment, or continuing a thought to the next line, is used in the last two lines, when the speaker fears that "the darkness teaches me/me that nothing matters." There is no fixed meter or foot, ranging from a spondaic monometer in lines like “No light shines” to the trochaic tetrameter in lines like “In this narrow bed of earth.” There are also an excessive number of syllables that do not fit into any specific foot. As stated before, there is a general “abcb” rhyme scheme, with the second and fourth lines of each quatrain in the end rhyme. Hughes uses words with longer vowels in the first three stanzas. In the first and third stanzas he uses a long “ē”; for example, “Forgetting every dream/.../ No light shines” and in the second verse he uses a long “ō”; for example, “I tried to keep a firm grip/…/Even as I clutched my soul.” In the last stanza, Hughes irritates the reader through the use of a short "ə" in the lines "The stardust never disperses/.../Me that nothing matters." The speaker of the poem is not the poet, Langston Hughes, but rather a dead man. This is implied when he talks about lying "under the cool dirt", or being buried underground, and he uses the past tense when talking about his life (i.e. "he tried to keep a firm grip", "he wanted to be a good man", “it pinched the soul”). “Master” the title refers to the deceased and the mistakes made during his life; as he tried to learn, “[he] taught more humbly,” that is, not developing as a person. The speaker indicates that he is sorry, with the...... middle of paper ......ch the dead speaker feels the "fresh dirt", which he is so accustomed to being underground. The theme, or central life message that Hughes is trying to convey in this poem is that what people intend to do in their lives doesn't matter if they don't do it; once a person dies, he is unable to accomplish what he wanted to do during his life. The speaker of this poem had ideals about what he wanted to do and who he wanted to be, as evidenced by the line "Humbly I tried to learn/.../I wanted to be a good man." He did not live up to these ideals, as demonstrated by the lines that follow them "The more humbly I taught /... / I pinched my soul". Like the stars, his ideals were “always out of reach.” Now that he is dead, he is no longer able to accomplish anything, "trembles that the darkness may teach/[him] that nothing matters." Works Cited "Teacher" by Langston Hughes
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