Twelfth Song of Thunder Analysis

The “Twelfth Song of Thunder” was traditionally performed as a chant. It doesn’t stick to a specific poetic meter or form. That said, the repetition that we’ll find in the poem is character...

The speaker of “Twelfth Song of Thunder” is a lover of nature. She’s a tree-hugger. Or maybe he’s a tree-hugger. We don’t get any identifying information here, so we’re just going to go...

The setting of this poem is, well, the great outdoors. There are no houses or roads or people. What the poem does give us is a sweeping vision of nature, which takes in natural phenomena happening...

“Twelfth Song of Thunder” is a chant, which means it’s meant to be sung out loud. So we might not be surprised to notice that the poem is very repetitive when we read it out loud. We discusse...

This poem’s title tells us several things. First of all, the title clues us in to the fact that this is a poem that is meant to be sung out loud, because the word “Song” is in the title. The...

The author (or authors) of this poem are anonymous. We don’t know who came up with it. But we can recognize it as a Navajo song because it has a lot of features in common with other Navajo songs...

We believe the technical term for this poem’s difficulty is “easy-peasy.” Even a second-grader wouldn’t have trouble with it. There are no complicated words, it’s repetitive, and its subj...

The Navajo Mountain Chant ceremony, of which “Twelfth Song of Thunder” is a part, is nine days long. (Source.)Ever wondered where that grasshopper might be singing? Navajo tribal land includes...

Grasshoppers and thunder? It’s not the most X-rated material you’ll ever find. The “Twelfth Song of Thunder” is so G-rated, we could sing it to our kid brother or sister to lull them to sle...

Mountain Chant ceremony (throughout): “Twelfth Song of Thunder” is a chant sung as part of the Mountain Chant ceremony, a ceremony that the Navajo people traditionally carry out in winter. The...