Zong! Literary Elements

The poem "Zong! #3’’ is told from the perspective of a third person objective point of view.

The poem "Zong! #I’’ has no form and meter since it is written in free form.

The sea on which the black slaves found themselves is compared in ‘’Zong! #17’’ with a ‘’sea of mortality’’. This comparison has the purpose of transmitting the idea that for the black slaves, dying was something which would inevitably come with a great deal of pain and suffering.

We find alliteration in the lines ‘’the that fact/the it was/the were’’ in ‘’Zong! #2’’.

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The poems can be seen both as meditative and historic poems. Through these poems, the narrator analyzes the way in which greed can push a person to perform unspeakable acts and it is historical because it is based on a real case which took place in the 19th century.

The action in the poems takes place on a ship in the middle of the ocean.

The tone in the poems is an extremely violent one, the narrator presenting through the poem the murder of countless slaves.

The protagonists in the poems are the black slaves and the antagonists are the different elements and people which put the life of the black people in danger.

The major conflict in the poems is presented as being between the black people who were enslaved and the people who sold them into slavery.

The poem ‘’Zong! #9’’ reaches its climax when the narrator admits for the first time the black men and women described in the poems are actually slaves.

The narrator mentions the death of black people from the first poem in the collection. This brief line in the first poem foreshadows the later description offered by the narrator when it comes to the way in which the black people suffered at the hand of their white oppressors.

In the first poems, the narrator gives no indication about the fate of the black men, just mentioning the fact they were going to be sold to their new masters. This is an understatement because later it is described how the slaves were thrown overboard and killed at sea for apparent no reason at all.

In the poem ‘’Zong! #5’’, the narrator mentions how ‘’seven out of seventeen’’ died while at sea. This is an allusion made to the large numbers of black men and women who died at sea while they were being transported from their country of origin to the country where they were going to be sold. The lack of ‘’sustenance’’ or rather the lack of food is what, according to the narrator, is responsible for the deaths of the countless black slaves.

The sentence ‘’throwing overboard’’ which is present in almost every poem in the collection is used here to suggest the atrocities which the black men and women enslaved had to endure.

We find personification in the line ‘’drowned the law’’ in ‘’Zong! #19’’.

We find hyperbole in the line ‘’the apprehension of rains’’ in ‘’Zong! #20’’.

We find onomatopoeia in the line ‘’crying waters’’ in ‘’Zong! #7’’.