When was refugee blues published

LitCharts Teacher Editions. Teach your students to analyze literature like LitCharts does. Detailed explanations, analysis, and citation info for every important quote on LitCharts. The original text plus a side-by-side modern translation of every Shakespeare play. Sign Up. Already have an account? Sign in. From the creators of SparkNotes, something better. Literature Poetry Lit Terms Shakescleare. The poem was completed in March , while Auden was living in New York.

The poem is spoken by a Jewish refugee living in New York, who is addressing his lover and reflecting on the fact that he — and many other refugees in a similar position — are not made welcome in the city. The best way to summarise the content of the poem might be to paraphrase it even though something is inevitably lost in paraphrase, it can help to clarify the meaning of a poem before proceeding to an analysis of it. Some of them are rich, and some are dirt-poor.

We used to have a country where we belonged: it was ours. And although it still exists, we cannot return there. Yew trees growing in graveyards can bloom again every spring, but once we relinquished our passports and fled our homeland, we did so for good.

I went to a committee to get a position, and they told me to sit down, but they turned me down for the job and said to come back next year. Despite the poem's specific setting and allusions to historical realities and individuals, it addresses broad themes such as political exclusion, the othering of minorities, and the alienation created by bureaucracy. It is a blues poem, a form rooted in African American music and literature.

Like most blues poems, it expresses emotions of sadness and despair through a lilting musical cadence. It is composed of twelve tercets with varying length and meter. It follows an AAB rhyme scheme. The first two lines of each stanza not only rhyme, but also contain similar or complementary information, while the final line of each stanza does not rhyme with the previous two and has contradictory, juxtaposed content.

This is a slight divergence from the traditional blues poem, in which the first two lines of each stanza are not merely linked but are near-identical. The language used is common, colloquial, informal, while the tone is sad, resigned and melancholic. It is to show the people the plight of their fellow humans, and how just because they were Jews they were denied basic rights.

It is an indirect appeal to show compassion by emphasizing that they the Jews were humans too, the same as the readers. Those make the song no less ominous. Death is present throughout and the poem ends with the image of the soldiers looking for the Jews. He stood on a great plain in the falling snow and had no shelter and hence had to roam in the open, constantly in fear of being hunted by the soldiers.

Then finally he saw tens of thousands of soldiers marching towards them. The speaker ends the poem by saying that the ten thousand soldiers were looking to find these two Jews looking for you and me. This contrast shows how much they are wanted compared to how much they are unwanted. The dream of the speaker suggests the emotional impact of their rejection and isolation which they were facing in their our country.

Auden is a documentation of the denial of the human rights of the migrant population of the world. The poem is all about the plight of a group of refugees, specifically about the alienation faced by the Jews in Nazi Germany. The poem was written in , though the poem has taken in a timeless accurate description of the situation of refugees all over the world, it describes about refugees, who were seeking asylum in nearby countries and what they actually face is the main theme of the poem.

The refugee problem is a complex one. They face many problems, not simply the threat of refoulement forcible return of refugees but arbitrary detention, lack of due process, degrading treatment, xenophobia etc. In the last decade, refugees who have been forcibly returned to their countries have been killed, tortured, arbitrarily detained, or forced to live in conditions of extreme insecurity.

The situation of many of them is excruciating, as they are often forced to remain within combat zones, are undernourished and have no access to clean water or medical supplies. The problems of refugees do not end when they finally cross borders and go through the first phase of seeking asylum, they may be confronted by numerous restrictions and obstacles. The universal declaration of human rights allows people to stand up for what they believe in no matter the repercussion.

Safeguarding human rights in countries of origin is therefore critical both for the prevention and for the solution of refugee problems. This concept of human rights is not new. Many states and communities have been established on the basis that individual members have certain inherent rights which must be respected by those governing.

But the growing number of refugees in the world is apparent proof of the failure of the system of international human rights protection. Some examples such as attacks on Palestinian refugees in Lebanese camps, Rohingya crisis, attacks on the Thai-Cambodian border and so on.