The Song of Sunrise by Mbuyiseni Oswald Mtshali
The sword of daybreak
snips the shroud
of the night from the sky,
and the morning
peeps through the blankets
like a baby rising
from its cot
to listen to the
peal of the bell.
Arise! Arise!
All Workers!
To work! To work!
You must go!
Buses rumble,
Trains rattle,
Taxis hoot.
I shuffle in the queue
with feet lhat patter
on the station platform,
and stumble into the coach
that squeezes me like a lemon
of all lhe juice of my life.
Questions
- What figure of speech is used in the first line of the poem?
- What tone, or connotation does the word "sword" give this image?
- What is the morning compared to in the first stanza?
- What associations do the pealing of bells carry?
- What does this tell us about the morning?
- What does the way the poet walks in the last stanza tell us about the way that he feels?
- What other metaphor confirms this?
- Write a paragraph describing how you feel going to school in the morning.
