Essay Questions

What represents the ‘thousands of tongues’ stretching out all over the world?

In the first part of the poem, the author talks about the thousands of tongues stretching and engulfing everything. The tongues in this context represent all the evolutionary miracles that took place in Africa. Scientists usually agree that Africa is the birth place of evolution, the place where everything started. Gradually, everything stretched to other parts of the world as well until the world became what it is today. The thousands of tongues are thus just a figure of speech to make reference to the way everything spread at a rapid peace all over the planet and also to suggest how everything had one starting point.

What is the dream?

In the first part of the poem and in the second one, the author mentions the dream that slowly takes form. He sometimes calls the dream as being a white one and as being molded by black hands. Taking this into consideration, we can assume that the dream is the civilized world the white people wanted to build. The fact that the white dream is molded by black hands suggest just how the white population had no troubles using black slaves to achieve their ideal society and how little they cared about the people they used.

What does the mentioning of the name Isaac in the second part of the poem suggests?

The name Isaac and also an allusion to the way he was supposed to be sacrificed in the Bible appears in the second part of the poem. The mentioning of the name Isaac is linked in the Bible with the birth of the Jewish people, the nation chosen by God. Thus, by mentioning the name Isaac, the author may have wanted to suggest that Christianity appeared in history for the first time and that it began to spread to other nations as well.