18 pages • 36 minutes read
Speak
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Appealing to God
The poem, which is in the form of a prayer or apostrophic address, expresses the speaker’s longing for an explanation of why life seems not to have gone well for him. The directness of the appeal to God is most apparent in the first and last stanzas. In the first stanza, the speaker states that he has been searching for “you” (Line 4)—he means God but does not yet say so—for a long time and in every way he can think of, but without any success. Now the search is at an end and he is wondering what to do, since it seems that the cause is hopeless. The image at the end of the stanza, of a streetlight spinning above the speaker, which in his spiritual blindness he is unable to see, suggests that there will be no relief for him.
The speaker’s use of the apostrophe “Lord” in three of the remaining four stanzas clarifies whom he is addressing, and the form of the prayer becomes more fully apparent in the last stanza, which in its earnestness approaches traditional religious language. As the speaker makes a final plea to God, he tries to put his own life in the best possible light: Having learned the lessons of Jesus Christ, the speaker has shown compassion to the unfortunate and has loved God’s creation. Surely, he implies, this makes him deserving of some kind of response from God.
The last four lines of the poem take on urgency, as the speaker demands that God “Come down” (Line 39) from on high and show Himself. However, in these lines the speaker also allows the reader to see him in the act of losing hope or even respect regarding the divine being. This can be seen in how he presents the word “thy.” In Lines 37 and 38, he capitalizes this pronoun, as a traditional mark of respect to the power and transcendent majesty of God. However, in the question with which the poem ends, “Why dost / Thou hide thy face?” (Lines 39-40), he does not capitalize the word “thy.” This suggests that the speaker is abandoning belief in, or at least respect for, God’s power (and is even expressing irritation) by diminishing the deity in a subtle manner. It is as if he is snubbing God. The speaker’s question thus becomes a rhetorical one. He is no longer expecting an answer, and he does not receive one.
Injustice and Empathy for the Downtrodden
At the beginning of the poem, the speaker cuts a solitary, unhappy figure, wandering around trying to find answers to life’s difficult questions. His misery is his own, and he expresses in Stanza 2 a sense of the unfairness of life. He has solidified this view by reading some verses in the Book of Ecclesiastes, written by a man who had also felt keenly the apparently random nature of existence. These biblical verses point out that people do not necessarily get what they deserve; the good as well as the bad suffer misfortune. With this in mind, the speaker stresses the fact that he empathizes with downtrodden, marginalized people.
First, he confesses in Stanza 4 that he was once on the wrong side of the law—so he has had his troubles too. In the final stanza, he states that he has befriended “Some, a few lonely some” (Line 33) who “have fallen in death. / I die with them” (Line 34). This reveals his capacity to reach out beyond himself and identify with the suffering of others. In referring to such people, he says to the Lord, “I have loved Thy cursed” (Line 37). In other words, he has done what he can, accessing the deepest and finest emotion he can muster, to show solidarity and compassion for the wretched.
Defeat and Resignation
Right at the beginning, when the speaker announces that all he can do is speak “in a flat voice” (Line 1), he gives a clue to his state of mind. He has been through a great deal and is weary and emotionally spent; now he is resigned to not achieving what he wanted, and his life is not satisfying or nourishing him. He therefore speaks in a “flat” tone, unable to put any expression into his words.
In the fourth stanza, just to make sure the reader does not forget, the speaker repeats the expression, prefacing it with another gloomy phrase: “I speak of flat defeat / In a flat voice” (Line 31-32). He thinks of himself as a defeated individual.
Nonetheless, he is compelled to speak, to say something, as the title, “Speak,” makes clear. Grammatically, the title is a verb in the imperative mood, expressing a command or an exhortation. Something inside the speaker compels him to verbalize his inner life, and indeed, readers may notice that his voice is not as flat as he would have them believe. For example, he reveals deep feeling when he speaks of Jenny, his lost muse, and creates an imaginative, if dispiriting, picture of her fate. Also, his plea to God in the final stanza has a desperate intensity. The flat tone conveys his self-belief about his own dejected state, but the sparks of liveliness in the language suggest there may be life in the man yet, his apparent defeat and resignation notwithstanding.
Unlock all 18 pages of this Study Guide
Plus, gain access to 9,100+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features: