Like protest songs, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” includes many examples of figurative language meant to persuade people to take action.

In each line, an instance of figurative language is already identified for you. Use what you learned in the lesson to identify the type of figurative language, explain what the figurative language means, and explain the tone and mood of the line from the letter. Some parts of the chart are already completed for you.

The line … from “Letter from Birmingham Jail”

is an example of …

(Which type of figurative language such as metaphor, simile, personification, symbol, or allusion?)
that means…

and creates a
tone

and a
mood.

Example:
This movement is nourished by the contemporary frustration over the continued existence of racial discrimination.

is an example of Personification

that means the movement grows because of the people’s frustration with racial discrimination

and creates a Factual tone and an Urgent mood.

1. …and see the tears welling up in her little eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky…

2. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into an abyss of injustice where they experience the bleakness of corroding despair.

tone

Urgent mood
3. To a degree, academic freedom is a reality today because Socrates practiced civil disobedience.

Socrates disobeyed laws that were not fair, which made it so students today can think freely (and possibly differently than their teachers).
tone

Thought-provoking mood
4. Like a boil that can never be cured as long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its pus-flowing ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must likewise be exposed, with all of the tension its exposing creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

5. In those days the Church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society.
Metaphor
The church did not just reflect what was happening in society; it could change what was happening in society.

6. Let us all hope the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities…

Optimistic tone

mood
7. Let us all hope the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities…