57514534 ENG1501 01

STUDENT NUMBER: 57514534
NAME: ODESHNIE DHAVER
MODULE: ENG1501
ASSIGNMENT 01: The Negro’s Complaint

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Question 1

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Question 2

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Question 3

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Question 4

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Question 5

Page 4

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ENG1501
ASSIGNMENT 01
The Negro’s Complaint
William Cowper
Question 01

William Cowper’s poem The Negro’s Complaint is narrated by an African slave as depicted in lines 1-2 where the narrator informs the reader that he\she was forced from their home in Africa. The significance of using the voice of an African slave is to depict the inhumanity of slave trade and to give the reader a detailed image of their lives as slaves. Lines 5-6 implies that the slaves were seized from their homes and were sold to the British for insignificant sums of money, this metaphor depicts the dehumanisation of these people as they have now become similar to that of animals being sold in a market. The narrator describes the inhumane torture they must now endure after having been torn away from “home and all its pleasures”, this gives the audience an idea of how inherently evil slave trade is.

Question 02

The personification in stanza 3 is depicted in lines 19-20 which describes how the narrator works in the plantation. The personification of their tears watering the crops denotes the pain and suffering the slave endures to nurture these crops. Line 20 creates an image of the slaves working hard to the point of exhaustion where their sweat covers the soil; this personification denotes inhumane working conditions and could imply that the slaves were forced to work for long hours at a time. The metaphor in stanza 3 is shown in lines 21 where the narrator is comparing the British masters’ hearts to that of an iron structure. The slave questions the masters to think about their actions against his people and implies that they have no human emotion whatsoever by comparing the masters hearts to that of a cold, inanimate object.

Question 03

The speaker uses