An analytic thesis should be a statement that you can argue for and defend. First, let’s analyze the poem and see what perspectives are apparent.

“Bent to the Earth” is a free verse memoir poem. It is realist and uses very little figurative language. It tells a story from the perspective of a five-year-old boy, who is in a truck on his way to pick tomatoes with his family and other Mexican migrant farmworkers. The truck is forced off the road by immigration officers, and the people inside the truck are beaten and arrested, despite some having valid visas. One man manages to escape and hides in a field. Some of the speaker’s friends are deported. In the final line, the speaker goes back to his work picking tomatoes in a field, “bent to the earth.” The anticlimax of the end of the poem creates a feeling of futility and inevitability.

The mood of this poem is fear and resignation. The themes are childhood trauma and child labor, the unnecessary cruelty of immigration officers, and the seemingly random and meaningless lottery of who is safe from that cruelty.

In creating an analytic thesis about this poem, we could say something about the constant fear that Mexican migrants to the USA live in, and the low-paid work that they do. We could also mention the trauma experienced by the speaker as a very young child, forced to watch his mother be beaten and his father’s terror at being forced to watch. An example of an analytic thesis for this poem is:

“US Immigration officers deliberately use violence and threats of deportation to terrorize Mexican people working legally in the agriculture industry.”