'Baby Can You Love Me Essay\r'

'Essex Hemphill is an extremely paradoxical poet, for his verses are a cabal of that what seems to be impossible to combine. He uses strange and drear wording in order to make his audition look at usual problems from unusual blame of view. In this regard his â€Å" botch Can You write out Me? ” is unmatchable of the about indicative among his verses, if not the some indicative 1. Love an shoemakers last are melt down together in this Freudian numbers, that go bads the deepest layers of hu small-arm sexual desire and Thanatos with the first being the desire of livelihood and the latter being the desire of death.\r\nHemphill’s poem makes it open(a) that these two desires apprise sometimes be champion. Essex go acrossd on AIDS that he has caught during sexual intercourses in a black gay community. He was perhaps aware of his prompt death when writing â€Å" indulge Can You Love Me? ”, and therefrom one enkindle wonder what is the rationality of asking to kill oneself and violent death a pick outd one who would certainly die soon? From the rational point of view, the poem is senseless. How invariably, what Hemphill’s poetry surely lacks is rationality. This is not a perfect verse with a tone, voice, rhythm and metre.\r\nIn fact, I am not sure whether Hemphill knew something at wholly of these formal medical prognosiss of poetry. â€Å"Baby Can You Love Me? ” has no plot and even no visible characters. It is a poetic question, and it is simply important whether it is a man asking a man or a man asking a woman, or a woman asking a man, or a woman asking a woman. It would be better to say that this is one personality asking other(prenominal) personality, and this asking personality experiences deep inner crisis that makes him or her turn to the most hidden and most unconscious mind motivations of own â€Å"I” that Hemphill was not afraid to articulate, reveal and analyze in his poem.\r\nThis is a deeply mental intuitive poem that flowerpot not be understood by analysis. In order to project Hemphill one needs a kind of occult insight, one needs to feel what he has matte and try to feel what he has felt when writing â€Å"Baby Can You Love Me? ” The poem opens with a classical question of all enamoured humans asked ever since men learned what is grapple, although this question is asked in a â€Å"horribly” informal manner usual for marginalized communities of black youth. This question is immediately contrasted with another one:\r\n atomic number 18 you unstrained to kill me if I ask you to? What makes Hemphill ask this question immediately after finking sock? perchance it is the word â€Å"willing” that might help to view that. This is a kind of examination, a ravel of write out that can be true only if the wills of the love ones are combined in one will. For most nation losing the truly loved one is a tragedy. So the question can be refo rmulated in a following manner: â€Å"are you make water to subject me and you to terrible suffering in the take a shit of love?\r\n” Classical literature from Shakespeare to modernity provides examples of killing loved ones out of painful passion, and Hemphill puts feeling to test by this passion. There are many reasons for which one idiosyncratic can resolve to put a violent end to the life of another individual, entirely killing out of love always authority killing out of passion. I can hardly imagine killing out of tempered love. So the question is as follows: â€Å"is your love so strong, go you lost your head so much that you can kill me?\r\n” This passionate plea for death can be nothing and an up-to-minute whim, insofar in order to instigate someone to commit off even this up-to-minute whim of a caramel brown has to pass away a law for another lover. Love makes people stronger, although this strength sometimes borders on insanity. It is unusual and super innate(p) for most people to kill someone else or commit suicide. And Hemphill hesitates whether he can kill himself, thus asking his lover for help in fulfilling this determination will: If I’m unable to do so Are you willing to kill me? at a time more we come across this formal aspect of will.\r\nHemphill asserts that his will may be not seemly to consciously die, so he needs a combination of two wills to fulfill his wish. Perhaps he already knows what is love, so now he is willing to know what is love’s eternal inverse death like, but he has not profuse will, so he needs an another will, an another â€Å"I” that would not be tied with natural instinctive will of life and whose will would be purer and stronger. In the concluding lines of the poem Hemphill does indirectly confess what his problem is about. It is in fact fear that keeps him alive.\r\nHe thus needs bravery, and can there be a greater bravery than the one of an enamoured individual in a moment when he or she confesses his or her feelings. So Hemphill asks: Can you be as brave and clearheaded as you are now, profession that you would love to love me? â€Å"Clearheaded” is perhaps one of the worst characteristics that can be applied to passions, for ‘clear head” is an antipode of passion. On the other hand. murdering the loved one with â€Å"clear head” is a certain demonstration of the place that love occupied in the brain of an individual.\r\nHemphill speaks of such high stage of passionate love when it becomes a part of a personality, and when the head becomes clean and heart becomes brave because of and due to this passion. A lover is â€Å"clearheaded” professing â€Å"love to love”, yet the poem eventually revolves around death. Does this mean that â€Å"love to love” implicates â€Å"love to death” and are lve and death interchangeable in the sense of Hemphill’s â€Å"Baby Can You Love Me? â₠¬Â Hemphill himself answers this question positively in the last lines of the poem: But could you kill me If I asked you to?\r\n” This passage echoes the first lines of the poem. â€Å"Baby can you love me” and â€Å"Baby can you kill me” are thence interchangeable questions. The ending resembles the medieval style of rondos †poems that started and stop with the same lines, symbolizing perfection and circularity of the verse. Whether consciously of not, Hemphill applied this method in his poem and integrated the two contrasting oppositions into a unity. Love is heedful by death and death is measured by love for Hemphill. He does not say that directly, but he makes us feel that.\r\n'