They Don't Love You Like I Love You

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2019

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form and meter

The 42-line lyric poem is arranged in 14 three-line stanzas, with fairly regular line length. Though the stanzaic pattern is regular, the poem is written in unmetered, unrhymed verse. However, the relatively short lines – the longest lines of the poem contain 9-10 words – the vocabulary loaded with primary words such as love, blood, and milk, and the frequent inclusion of song-lyrics give the poem a musical quality. Most of the poem’s words use one (my, said, this, me) to three (Beyonce, begging, mother) syllables, with vowel sounds stressed and pronounced, creating internal music.

Additionally, the poet uses literary devices such as alliteration to add internal melody and rhythm to the poem. The intimate “m” sound is repeated in alliterations throughout the poem, drawing in the reader. It can be found in phrases such as “my mother” (Lines 1, 4, 21, and more) and “so many of mine” (Lines 10). Another example of alliteration is in the phrase “loud lights” (Line 25). These repeated sounds create a feeling of constant movement, constant running, repeating the patterns and echoing the violence, the history, the vigilance, and the feeling of persecution that continuously follows the speaker throughout her life.

Synesthesia and imagery

The poem’s imagery – its audiovisual landscape – is rich and complex, evoking images of physical objects such as clouds, spilled milk, blood clots, the American flag, maps, cinema projectors, and plows, as well as fleshing out abstract ideas like love and death. The imagery is also replete with snatches of song, evoking the idea of music floating into spaces. Thus, the poem’s landscape is a metaphor for America, filled with American sounds, sights, and hidden truths. The hidden-truths-aspect of the American landscape is evoked through images like white maps, spilled milk, clots, and ghosts. The abstract idea of a ghost is here linked (by association with maps) with the image of a white sheet. Whiteness has made ghosts out of Native Americans. Though the imagery of maps and whiteness continues in the first half of the poem, the second half moves on to two striking images: one of a projector flickering sepia and blue over the Native American body, and two, of the speaker as both yoke and beast of burden, and America as a plow. These odd, disparate images show the poem’s panoramic reach, moving from movie theatre to wide fields.

The poem also uses devices like synesthesia to appeal to several senses at once. For instance, the phrase “loud lights” (Line 25), ascribes loudness, an aural quality to light, a visual phenomenon. The reader immediately feels the overwhelming nature of the lights, which are loud and strong and overpower the senses of the speaker. The particular phrase illustrates how the loud lights attempt to drown out the voice and individuality of the speaker.

Metaphors and homonyms

“They don’t love you like I love you,” is especially rich in metaphors, which it uses to capture the essence of something which doesn’t want to be captured: the real history of America. To illustrate this history, which mainstream narrative tries to bleach out, the poet draws attention to the very process of bleaching out or whitewashing. Thus, she uses metaphors of whiteness for America (as discussed earlier, clouds, spilled milk and so on) to highlight the obscuring nature of whiteness. White is a color usually associated with purity and brightness, but the poet makes it a metaphor for obliteration, death, and silencing. The other metaphors used are that of the maps of America, the cinema projector, and the yoke, beast, and plow. The poem’s title and its mention of pop songs itself is a metaphor for how in America positivity often coexists with the horrific, and is also often complicit in those horrors.

The poem is a meditation on language as well, showing how language is appropriated and how it can be reclaimed. By interpreting the Yeah Yeah Yeahs song in her own light, the poet reclaims American popular culture and language for her own. In the poet’s interpretation, words are loaded with new meaning. She uses devices such as homonyms (words with similar sounds or spellings but different meanings) to illustrate the slippery and powerful nature of languages. An example of homonyms occurs when the speaker interprets the word “wait” (Line 29) of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs song as its homonymic “weight” (Line 32). The request of the song is turned into the idea of heft or gravitas, which the speaker will need to bear the burden of racial oppression.