Kofi Awoonor's 'Sea Eats the Land at Home' is an extended metaphor for colonialism and the loss of home and identity.

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Kofi Awoonor's poem "The Sea Eats the Land at Home" talks of a small African town flooding. It is expressed with 4 stanzas, the first 2 having 5 lines, the third having 4, and the final stanza having 18 lines. The poem is an extended metaphor for colonialism and the loss of home and identity.

I think the poem has a mainly somber tone, especially in the last stanza. It talks about how these two women lost everything; Aku lost her home and Adena lost her trinkets, which were her dowry and joy. I also think it has a tone of despair, and again I refer to the last stanza, in addition to the second and third stanza. The second stanza talks about how the sea came, and destroyed the whole town, carrying away everything. The third stanza talks about how the people reacted to the sea flooding their town, the wails, and the mourning. This is a really sad topic, and there doesn't seem to be a sense of hopefulness anywhere.

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The title has been repeated in the first, second, and last stanza. This is because, in the third stanza, it describes the anguish of the people and their reaction. In this stanza, the people as a whole are the subject. In the first and second stanza, the subject is the sea. I think the relevance of the title is that it describes exactly what the poem is talking about. It talks about how the sea has flooded the land using a metaphor because obviously, the sea does not eat the land, though it may have seemed that way to the ...

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