Analysis of "I Have a Dream" Speech
“I Have A Dream”
Martin Luther King Jr.
On August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech that electrified a nation. In Washington D.C, King delivered his speech on the steps of the Lincoln memorial and as his powerful voice echoed out across an audience of 200,000 people, echoes of the Gettysburg address could be heard as well as the Declaration of Independence and the Bible. It has been called “masterfully delivered and improvised sermon, bursting with biblical language and imagery.”The passionate speech is filled with rhetorical devices that help ground into earth King's demands of racial equality and outcries of social injustice.
The second paragraph of the speech starts with “Five score years ago”, an allusion to Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg address. This is particularly poignant due to the fact that the speech was given on the steps of his memorial. A memorial to the president who passed the emancipation proclamation. Martin Luther King Jr. continues with comparing this (the emancipation proclamation) “momentous decree” to a “great beacon light” to those who had “been seared in the flames of withering injustice” in an example of a simile and then a metaphor. The metaphor is expanded to call the proclamation “a joyous daybreak” to a “long night.” The metaphors help prove King's point through contrasting two abstract concepts through tangible things. The last sentence of the second paragraph is the first of many references to the bible. In comparing Psalms 30:5 “For his anger is but for a moment; his favor is for a lifetime. Weeping may linger for the night, but joy comes with the morning” to King's line “ It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity” the parallels can be seen. The use of biblical references helps link the work of MLK to the bible and divine things. Southerners being in the “bible belt” and dominantly Christian, this reference to the bible strikes home to these slaveholders.
The third paragraph contains a
Martin Luther King Jr.
On August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech that electrified a nation. In Washington D.C, King delivered his speech on the steps of the Lincoln memorial and as his powerful voice echoed out across an audience of 200,000 people, echoes of the Gettysburg address could be heard as well as the Declaration of Independence and the Bible. It has been called “masterfully delivered and improvised sermon, bursting with biblical language and imagery.”The passionate speech is filled with rhetorical devices that help ground into earth King's demands of racial equality and outcries of social injustice.
The second paragraph of the speech starts with “Five score years ago”, an allusion to Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg address. This is particularly poignant due to the fact that the speech was given on the steps of his memorial. A memorial to the president who passed the emancipation proclamation. Martin Luther King Jr. continues with comparing this (the emancipation proclamation) “momentous decree” to a “great beacon light” to those who had “been seared in the flames of withering injustice” in an example of a simile and then a metaphor. The metaphor is expanded to call the proclamation “a joyous daybreak” to a “long night.” The metaphors help prove King's point through contrasting two abstract concepts through tangible things. The last sentence of the second paragraph is the first of many references to the bible. In comparing Psalms 30:5 “For his anger is but for a moment; his favor is for a lifetime. Weeping may linger for the night, but joy comes with the morning” to King's line “ It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity” the parallels can be seen. The use of biblical references helps link the work of MLK to the bible and divine things. Southerners being in the “bible belt” and dominantly Christian, this reference to the bible strikes home to these slaveholders.
The third paragraph contains a