Wendell's Essay

Love towards a brother is that one feeling that will never leave your body. You can sometimes not be happy with your brother, but you will still love, cherish, hold [asyndeton] them close to you. The love is undying towards him. In “The Little Brother Poem” by Naomi Shihab Nye and “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin, love is shown to their brothers like a shining light.

In “The Little Brother Poem,” figurative language is used to show Ms. Nyes love towards her brother. In the first stanza she writes “I keep seeing your car in the streets, but it never turns at our corner.” Its as if she knows he is out there, waiting for her to find him, but he won’t come back to them. They haven’t spoken for a year, but too her it seems like forever. Secondly, she uses figurative speech to show she regrets being terrible to him. He has “some strange bruise that [he] still carried under the skin,” a bruise that she possibly gave to him, from all the years of being mean. Lastly, she uses figurative language to show how they are different, for “[he is] Wall Street and [she’s] the local fruit market.” She doesn’t care that they are different though, she will “take differences over things that match.” He is a worker, she is like a mother “answering the mail.” In conclusion, Ms. Nye uses a vast [FAST] amount of figurative language to make her point.

There are several ways that Ms. Nye’s poem can be related to “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin. The first reason is that they both lost a family member, even if one ended more tragically [FAST] than the other. For Sonny, “little Grace died in the fall,” and “she suffered” from fever and then polio. But for Ms. Nye, her brother just “disappeared into the streets of Dallas.” The second reason they can be related is their relationships with their siblings. Ms. Nyes relationship was troubled by years of meanness and hatefulness. On the other hand, Sonny and his brother finally made up for Sonny “looked at [him], and nodded” as if it was a quick “I love you.” Lastly, both Ms. Nye and Sonny contained the realization of life. Sonny thought about past lives, “the moonlit rode where [his] father’s brother died” and his precious daughter Grace. Indifferently, Ms. Nye is worried about her brothers for “[he] is on the edge of [his] today.” To summarize, both Ms. Nye and Sonny have faced many terrible and lovely events that can be related to each other.

Why we get angry at our siblings is a mystery to me. Yes they can annoy and berate [FAST] us, but life is too short for petty remarks thrown from each person’s mouth. As you can see in these two works, things happen that can effect your live in seconds. Both Ms. Nye and Sonny now see that your family is the most important aspect of your life.