Describe how techniques have been used in the text

Ballad of Birmingham is a poem about a young girl and her mother. It is written by Dudley Randall and he uses description, similes and metaphors and dialogue to add effect in the text. The little girl asks her mother if she can go protest with other young kids. The mother is worried about her young child and asks her to go to church instead where it is pure. A while later the mother hears an explosion and runs to the church to find it in rubble.

In the poem Randall uses description to show more detail and create a better visual image in the reader’s head. In the second stanza the child asks her mother to go protest with other kids. In response her mother says “No, baby, no, you may not go, for the dogs are fierce and wild”. When she says this she doesn’t just mean the dogs, she’s talking about how unsafe it is. “No, baby, no, you may not go, for I fear those guns may fire”. In this line she directly tells her child that she’s worried about what could happen to her child. This is used to show the child was too young to understand what their mother was saying unless told directly. This helps us understand how young this child really is.

In the poem Randall uses similes and metaphors to empower statements with meanings they didn’t have before. “And drawn white gloves on her small brown hands, and white shoes on her feet”. When Randall uses this metaphor he means to create a deeper meaning. In this instance the church is a very pure, untouched place and a safe place for a child. To say the child was drawing on the clothes, when in reality they would be putting them on is showing us how young the child is. Children love to draw and using drawing in this metaphor helps us get an understanding of  how young the kid is. In current day church is viewed differently. It’s a ceremony where adults and children praise or talk to their gods. In the poem church is seen as a place for children to go and sing in the choir.

In the poem Randall uses dialogue to help us learn more about the two characters. The first few stanzas use only dialogue of the child and parents talking. Through this we can find out what type of character they are. For example, when the child speaks they start their sentence with “Mother dear,”. We learn from this more about the kids’ background. They sound polite, brought up with wealth, quite young. When the mother addresses the child back, she says “No, baby, no”. She’s addressing the child as a baby, so we can interpret that the kid is indeed young. Most families in real life have a different way of addressing each other and you can find out about someone by how they speak to their parents. 

Ballad of Birmingham by Dudley Randall is a poem where he uses description, similes and metaphors and dialogue to add effects that help bring the text together. He uses description to add my detail to a sentence and gives the reader a better understanding. Ballard also adds similes and metaphors to add a deeper meaning behind a sentence that we understand through comprehending the text. Dialogue is used effectively to add more detail to parts of the poem, and to show us more traits of a character. The march in real life was done on May 2nd 1963 and multiple children died that day.