Journal 17

I chose the poem "Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane" by Etheridge Knight.  The speaker appears to be a male that is in prison judging by the title because they are returning "Hard Rock" back to jail from the hospital.  The speaker is telling a story about how he how crazy Hard Rock is he is not addressing anyone in particular.  The speakers attitude, as well as their tone is rather intense.   In the second stanza he capitalizes WORD to emphasize that what he had had heard was that the Hard Rock didn't take any guff from anyone.  The setting of this poem is obviously in prison and I believe that the time is in the 1950s or so.  The two clues I discovered that point to this are the use of the N word multiple times in the poem it was extremely prevalent at that time period.  The second clue was the Hospital for the criminally insane places like that are not titled that anymore, but they were in that time period.  The tone changes throughout this poem at first the author is very intense and excited about the prospect of seeing this so called psycho path in action.  You can tell he is intense by the capitalization of "WORD" twice in the second stanza.  After realizing that he had changed and mellowed out they become disappointed. "And we turned away, our eyes to the ground. Crushed." The theme of this poem, in me opinion, is that people are capable of change no matter who they are.  It is said at the beginning of this poem that Hard Rock had a record for days in the hole because he was so mean and hot tempered, but at the end of the poem he had mellowed out and seemingly learned to control his anger.