Native Guard Literary Elements

The poem is in the first-person perspective. The speaker is a recently freed slave who joins the Union army in the hopes of finding a new, better life. His writing is primarily characterized by a desire to bear witness to the historical events occurring in front of him, as well as the recounting of his personal journey.

The poem is written as a crown of sonnets. They have no rhyme scheme but are written in iambic pentameter.

The poem uses a great deal of figurative language. The speaker uses a simile to compare the writing in his journal to the scars on the back of a former slave: "It was then a dark man / removed his shirt, revealed the scars, crosshatched / like the lines in this journal, on his back." He uses another simile while describing the X that Confederate prisoners sign their letters with: "X binds them to the page—a mute symbol / like the cross on a grave." He also uses similes in the following lines: "Now I tend Ship Island graves, mounds like dunes," the sunrise to skin, "dawn pink as new flesh," "his arms outstretched as if borne / upon the cross," "I dreamt their eyes still open—dim, clouded / as the eyes of fish washed ashore, yet fixed," and "Smoke that rose from each gun / seemed a soul departing." Finally, in the line "the dead molder—a scaffolding of bone," the speaker uses a metaphor to draw a parallel between the bones of the dead soldiers and the scaffolding on a building.

There is alliteration in the T, S, G, and W sounds of the lines "thirty-three with history of one younger," "salt, sugar, even this journal, near full," "tossing the ships, the great gunboats bobbing," "We watched and learned," "as if we were the enemy," "wren, willet, egret, loon," and "too big for words: worry for beloveds." There is assonance in the -on, -ow, and -or sounds of the lines "song of bondage—dirge in the river's throat," "we know now to tie down what we will keep," and "They long for the comfort of former lives."

The speaker notes that it is ironic that he is stationed at Fort Massachusetts, as the free state after which it is named was never a place he felt safe enough to travel to. He also states that it is ironic that he has become the jailer for a group of Confederate soldiers who would have enslaved him.

Sonnets, war poetry

The poem takes place during the Civil War and is set in Fort Massachusetts, a Union prison camp.

The tone used in the poems is a reflective and tragic one.

The protagonist of the poem is the speaker. The antagonists of the poem are his Union superiors who treat him and the other Black soldiers as if their lives are valueless.

The major conflict in the poem is the speaker's desire for freedmen to be seen as equals by their racist Union superiors and to have their contribution to the cause be acknowledged.

The climax of the poem occurs in the section titled "June 1863," in which the speaker describes a group of Black soldiers whose bodies have been left unclaimed on the battlefield at Port Hudson. This cruel and disrespectful gesture from a Union general solidifies the speaker's despair about the treatment of freedmen in army.

In "June 1863," the speaker's mention of some names not being remembered by the pages of history foreshadows the news that a general has abandoned the bodies of a Black regiment in Port Hudson.

The colonel's characterization of the loss of life at Pascagoula as "an unfortunate incident" is an understatement.

The poem alludes to multiple real battles in the American Civil War, including Gettysburg, Fort Pillow, Pascagoula, and Port Hudson.

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In the poem's opening, the speaker personifies the landscape's "bondage," depicting the "dirge in the river's throat / where it churns into the Gulf, wind in trees / choked with vines."

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