A Stylistic Analysis of If They Come in the Morning by Warsan Shire
Keywords:
Stylistic analysis, If They Come in the Morning, survival, resistance, fear, Warsan ShireAbstract
The poetry of Warsan Shire expresses the themes of displacement, fear and survival using novel rhetoric and poetic elements. The poem If They Come in the Morning is both emotionally charged and politically impractical in marginalized experiences, which explains its intriguing nature as an object of stylistic investigation. This study seeks to determine the stylistic devices used in the poem by Shire and determine how rhythm, imagery, and repetition create the concepts of survival, resistance, and fear. The poem was examined using a qualitative stylistic framework with close reading using the theory of stylistics by Leech and Short (2007) and Halliday (1971) to get the relationship of linguistic form and meaning. The discussion indicated that imagery and vulnerability, repetition and fear turning into resistance, and rhythm and emotional turbulence were reflected to create poetics of survival. The study comes to a conclusion that the stylistic decisions made by Shire go beyond aestheticism and make language a potent instrument of defiance and self-defense.
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