Explication of Dudley Randalls “The Melting Pot” An explication is aninterpretation of a written work. They differ from person to person in that weall dont interpret things alike. It seems to me that we learned in highschool about literature and such was a waste of memorizing and testing becausewe were taught only “right” answers about written works.
There is no rightway to interpret an authors work. What they do is leave doors open to makeyou think about their work. Even a songwriter does the same thing. Songs can beeven more difficult to interpret than a poem or story because the first thatthing usually attracts us to a song is the music and that is what we concentrateon mostly. Then a question comes about in my mind that why there has to be anyanswers or meaning to a work.
Why cant I just enjoy a poem for the way itsounds when it is read aloud? Why cant I just enjoy a song for the way thewords are put together and enjoy the music? It can be fun sometimes to analyze awork and pick out things like wonderful metaphors. I can see where that comes into literature. What I hate is when I read a really great story and I enjoy itand then I go to class and get hounded for answers and I give them and theyrenot right because I felt different about a story than someone else. Well,anyway, Im going to do the best explication I can of Dudley Randalls”The Melting Pot” on page 693. Bartorillo 2 “The Melting Pot” seems tobe about anyone and everyone being accepted as Americans except Blacks.
Thesecond set of four lines is kind of funny because it gives you several namesthat sound un-American and when they come to be an American they lose that anduse a more American version of their name. Even when people came through EllisIsland they usually took a different name or made theirs shorter to be moreAmerican. The next four lines read about a Black man who is unaccepted as anAmerican even though hes been there waiting for it. The poem seems to saythat no matter where youre from if youre white you can become a whiteAmerican no matter what country youre from. It seems to say that weredivided into Whites and Blacks regardless of nationalities.
The end of the poemis where Blacks decide that theyre going to be who they are and be proud ofit and they dont care about being accepted or not. So that was my owninterpretation of a poem. Someone else might have another idea about it but thatis perfectly okay because our minds work in all different ways.
