Chosen

Marilyn NelsonFiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1990

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Summary

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Dramatic Irony

“Chosen” opens with a wish for death—“Diverne wanted to die” (Line 1)—and ends with a celebration of the life to which she gave birth, that of Pomp Atwood. Dramatic irony is a device in which the speaker—in this case, a third-person omniscient narrator—reveals information contradicting the audience’s knowledge or sense of what is true. In the first stanza, the audience is set up to feel Diverne’s terror and her attempt to harden herself in response to fear by “[killing] part of her heart” (Line 3). The dark misery of “that August night” (Line 1) comes undone after the birth of Pomp—“her life’s one light” (Line 5). By the poem’s final lines, the narrator reveals Diverne has come to see her life as intertwined with that of the man who assaulted her, which would contradict a reader’s understanding of how someone would view their rapist. The narrator also goes as far as to say that the encounter wasn’t rape, despite the conditions—“her raw terror” and “his whip” (Line 14)—that made it so.

Nelson’s use of dramatic irony complicates the reader’s understanding of these encounters between white men and enslaved women. Were they ever tender? Could anything good result from an assault? The poem leads the reader to believe Diverne, in the end, decided what the encounter meant for her. Thus, an experience of agony resulted in “starburst joy” (Line 8).

Persona

Literary critic Oren Izenberg loosely defines persona as a device in which a speaker narrates an experience from a specific vantage point, thereby revealing hidden aspects of the self and personal experience. However, the narrator makes these revelations within a highly stylized art form—in this case, a free-verse sonnet—and uses that form to mediate the audience’s understanding of the event within the poem.

The third-person omniscient narrator in “Chosen” describes with certainty an event from the past. The speaker knows “Diverne wanted to die” (Line 1) and evokes the setting in which the protagonist supposedly experienced these emotions, as if the narrator were present and hovering above Diverne while the white man raped her. The narrator also expresses with certainty how Diverne chose to regard her experience: not as a rape. The voice telling this story is preoccupied with Diverne and reveals little about her attacker. The reader knows he was white because of his moon-like face and the “twelve-room house” (Line 10) from which he came.

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Through the device of persona, Nelson creates a voice in which she reclaims her family’s history—which slaves were regularly denied—and assumes herself as the authority of her family’s origin story.

The Sonnet

Nelson takes a popular traditional form of verse and subverts it to tell the story of her maternal family as it was told to her by her mother, Johnnie Mitchell Nelson. Nelson employs rhyme only for emphasis—to mark the moment in which Pomp was conceived.

Nelson’s subversion of the sonnet is also poignant in light of the form’s purpose. Used by both Petrarch and Shakespeare to compose odes of romantic love, in Nelson’s hands it becomes a declaration of gratitude to her great-great-grandmother. She did not love the man who forced a sex act on her, but she loved the son—the “starburst joy” (Line 8) who resulted.