Coal

Audre Lorde’s poem is written in free-verse. The three stanzas vary in length, from four lines to 15 lines. The lines also vary in length, from one word to nearly covering the full width of a book page.

The first stanza, which has seven lines, begins with the shortest line of the poem. It simply contains the pronoun “I” (Line 1). This puts the focus of the poem on the speaker, who can be read as Lorde herself. “I” is a word that she says, which begins the theme of the power of speech and language. The word “I” is not just associated with Blackness. Identity, for her, is forever linked to being Black, as seen in the definition of “I” that she gives: “the total black” (Line 2). She asserts that Blackness comes from deep inside the earth, beginning the central metaphor, or comparison, of coal (something that is inside the earth) with Blackness.

In the second half of the first stanza, the metaphor of Blackness with coal is developed by comparing words to diamonds. How a diamond becomes a “knot of flame” (Line 5)—a gem with an internal sparkly fire—is aligned with how sounds become words.