Sorrow Is Not My Name

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2011

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form and Meter

Gay’s “Sorrow Is Not My Name” is a free verse, single stanza poem, following no particular rhyme or metrical structure. Instead, Gay depends upon figurative language, sound texture, and enjambment to pace the poem, creating tension and surprise as he weaves images across lines of varied length. Maintaining one stanza for the entire poem echoes the speaker’s frame of mind, as he moves between detailed images and more philosophical musings in an organic way, mimicking the natural flow of his thoughts. Punctuating the poem with syntactically simple and colloquial asides, such as “Just like that,” (Line 11) “Think of that,” (Line 17), and “I remember,” (Line 23) provides the poem with rhythmic anchors, slowing it down and requiring the reader to fully consider the previous line or image. These sentences, combined with phrases like “And to boot” (Line 11) and “yeah, yeah,” (Line 19), reinforce the casual, friendly tone of the poem, creating intimacy with the reader.

Enjambment

Gay uses a mixture of end-stopped and enjambed lines, or lines that end in the middle of a phrase without terminal punctuation. The combination controls the pacing of the poem, directing the reader to either pause and consider the full line, or proceed quickly to the next. This is purposeful and crafted; in an interview with Writer’s Digest, Gay describes his complex relationship with his poems’ rhythm as a way of testing language:

I spent a lot of time thinking about the sentences in the way that I think about the lines in poems, so there’s a kind of pressure on the language that I enjoy, and getting real down into the arrangement of the words in the way that I also tend to my poems (Lipp, Cassandra. “Delightful Observation: An Interview with Ross Gay.” Writer's Digest, Writer's Digest, 9 June 2020).

The poem’s first line is heavily enjambed, featuring a full sentence and only the first word of the next one. The word “No” creates tension; readers quickly move to the next line to discover how the phrase will resolve.

Gay wants certain lines to have a slow, meditative feel; when we completes the image of the vulture, he stops the line at the end of the sentence after “the sickle of his beak” (Line 7). Similarly, when he wants the reader to “Think of that” (Line 17) after his second acknowledgement of mortality in lines 17-19, he also end-stops the line. Conversely, when Gay wants to create surprise and tension, and to build up the sense of bounty his poem offers, he enjambs lines. In the middle of the list of the “naturally occurring sweet things” (Line 13), the lines about purchasing okra are enjambed to sweep the reader into the experience of the speaker’s joy.

The Epigraph

The poem follows its title with the epigraph “after Gwendolyn Brooks”—a notation that signifies that Gay is responding to the work of another poet, thus creating conversation. In “Sorrow Is Not My Name,” Gay directly answers Gwendolyn Brooks’s earlier poem “To the Young Who Want to Die,” allowing the reader to understand Gay as a poet in Brooks’s lineage.

As a Black writer often responding to her social climate, Brooks wrote her poem as a plea to young Black people in her community. As a Black writer from that younger generation Brooks was addressing, Gay is an apt poet to reply to Brooks. His poem offers an internalized rejoinder to her plea to “remember, green’s your color” (Brooks, Gwendolyn. “To the Young Who Want To Die.” Get Lit Anthology): He writes in the last line of his poem, “I remember. My color's green” (Line 23).