“A Poem for Myself (Or Blues for a Mississippi Black Boy) – Knight

This poem has insight to motivation; it depicts the author’s insight to experience. A young boy leaves home and travels North to freedom. He is leaving to experience new things and a life he’s never had. This is poignant because he leaves at such a young age and at the mere age of twelve he could see that the life that he had as a black boy in the south was not what he wanted at the time. It shifts however, when after seeing all these places and being in the north, he ends up back home. The place he once left, the Mississippi south, he finally returned to; he returned home. It is the marker of his selfhood. He grew up there and ultimately decided that he would live there, or die there, all in the Mississippi mud.