Melting Pot By Dudley Randall
Explication of Dudley Randall’s "The Melting
Pot" An explication is an
interpretation of a written work. They differ from
person to person in that we
all don’t interpret things alike. It seems to me
that we learned in high
school about literature and such was a waste of
memorizing and testing because
we were taught only "right" answers about
written works. There is no right
way to interpret an author’s work. What they
do is leave doors open to make
you think about their work. Even a songwriter
does the same thing. Songs can be
even more difficult to interpret than a
poem or story because the first that
thing usually attracts us to a song is
the music and that is what we concentrate
on mostly. Then a question comes
about in my mind that why there has to be any
answers or meaning to a work.
Why can’t I just enjoy a poem for the way it
sounds when it is read aloud?
Why can’t I just enjoy a song for the way the
words are put together and
enjoy the music? It can be fun sometimes to analyze a
work and pick out
things like wonderful metaphors. I can see where that comes in
to literature.
What I hate is when I read a really great story and I enjoy it
and then I go
to class and get hounded for answers and I give them and they’re
not right
because I felt different about a story than someone else. Well,
anyway, I’m
going to do the best explication I can of Dudley Randall’s
"The Melting
Pot" on page 693. Bartorillo 2 "The Melting Pot" seems to
be about anyone and
everyone being accepted as Americans except Blacks. The
second set of four
lines is kind of funny because it gives you several names
that sound
un-American and when they come to be an American they lose that and
use a
more American version of their name. Even when people came through
Ellis
Island they usually took a different name or made theirs shorter to
be more
American. The next four lines read about a Black man who is
unaccepted as an
American even though he’s been there waiting for it. The
poem seems to say
that no matter where you’re from if you’re white you can
become a white
American no matter what country you’re from. It seems to
say that we’re
divided into Whites and Blacks regardless of nationalities.
The end of the poem
is where Blacks decide that they’re going to be who they
are and be proud of
it and they don’t care about being accepted or not. So
that was my own
interpretation of a poem. Someone else might have another
idea about it but that
is perfectly okay because our minds work in all
different ways.