Summer Oracle (Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Audre Lorde
- First Published: 1976
- Type of Work: Dramatic monologue
- Genres: Poetry, Dramatic monologue
- Subjects: Magic or magicians, Politics, Love or romance, Gender roles, Future, Hope, Violence, Fire, Prophecy or prophets, Meditation, Cities or towns, Alchemy, Oracles, Sun, Summer, Morning
The Poem
An oracle is a prophecy or prediction of the future transmitted through a priest. Audre Lorde’s “Summer Oracle” is a prophecy transmitted through the voice of an African American lesbian poet. The poem is a prophetic meditation on the consequences of hopelessness. In the first stanza of this thirty-seven-line poem, the reader is given the world without hope: “Without expectation/ there is no end/ to the shocks of morning/ or even a small summer.” At first it is difficult to grasp how the two basic and utterly unremarkable moments of beginning can be...
[The entire page is 1485 words long]
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