The+Swimmers,+Allen+Tate

Poems are wonderful things. They can tell a story, voice an opinion, or even express a feeling. The poem, the Swimmers; by Allen Tate, is a poem that tells a story, also known as a narrative poem. The way the poem was written is a hard read at first but after the second or third time you read it, it comes to you. The setting of the story is in Montgomery County, Kentucky, I the July of 1911. The plot of this narrative poem is when three black men are killed by a group of legal, white men. These men were probably part of the Ku Klux Klan as well. The climax is when the speaker comes out of the water and sees the white men on horses again and his friends are gone, killed by the men.

“The Swimmers” is a very long poem. It consists of 28, three lined stanzas. There is also an ABA end rhyme scheme in each separate stanza. The poem is written in a way so that it looks like a story in paragraph form has been split up, even in mid sentence sometimes, so that the stanzas rhyme or the words at the end of each line can b manipulated to make the end rhyme scheme work. There is some alliteration in the poem like “Dog-days”, the beginning of stanza seven and “posse passed”, in the middle line of stanza nine. Also, in the begging of the poem (stanzas 2-3), a shadow of a grape vine is compared to mullein and child’s happiness and there is personification there to because the shadows are said to have “run across the green swirl” (stanza two).

I can relate to this poem in two ways. One Is that I too sometimes fell that fear then relaxation when I jump into a pool if water, whatever kind of body of water it may be. The second way I can relate to the poem is that I have also lost someone that was very special to me. His name was Garret. He was one of my good friend’s brother who was a toddler when he downed in their pool in the back yard. =__// meaning //__=