I find this the most interesting part of the poem. Everything that comes before this line is O'Hara remarking almost on autopilot, about the mundane tasks of the day Billy Holiday died. Upon first reading I assumed that the speaker is the one who has died. After taking a closer look and taking into consideration the social and historical clues in the poem, it is revealed that it is about the speaker reminiscing about the day where Billy Holiday died. This shocking event splits his day almost in half - everything before it was mundane tasks - and with the death of Billy Holiday it shocks him into being acutely aware of his day and the present moment. This poem is really about death and the absurdity of the daily tasks of day to day life - death can be unexpected, it can hit us at any given moment.

Bastille day is a French national holiday that celebrates the fall of the military prison Bastille and signals the beginning of the French Revolution.

Lady is a nickname given to Billy Holiday by the public. It's interesting he used this in the title as it's a subtle reference but also leaves room for the reader to investigate who is the lady that died.

To me, it is unclear how the child speaker feels about religion or his relationship to it. On one hand he seems to resent the idea of god, whose made up a heaven of human suffering. However, many people at this time looked to religion and the afterlife as a sort of comforting thought - something to look forward to after a life of hardship, pain, and suffering.

This poem is written in the historical backdrop of the beginning of the industrial revolution. Child labour, terrible working conditions, and abysmal wages were very common. Children in particular were chosen to be chimney sweepers because their small agile bodies were the only ones who could properly fit inside a chimney to clean it out. There is a sense of irony with this poem belonging in the Songs of Experience category. Experience implies maturation or adulthood but the speaker of this poem is a child who is supposed to be 'innocent' but instead experiencing the pain and sorrow of child labour.

Uses a simili here to point to the theme - expressing his pain as an African American through blues music is exhasuting him to the point of death or crushing exhaustion.

The repetition of these lines also give the poem a lyrical quality as in many lyrics lines are repeated for musical effect. The three ellipses offer the reader a pause. The pause is similar to a line break in a piece of music pointing to the next verse. It is called a Refrain. They are repeated sections of text that appear at the end of a stanza or verse and imply continuous movement.

Repition.

Taking on the voice of the singer.

Poem does not have a rigid rhythmic scheme but instead has inconsistent rhyming couplets.

Using consosce sounds like the ck rocks back and forth establishing a swinging rhythm for the poem.

Using alliteration with the dr soun. He opens with poetic techniques and devices to achieve the rhythmic and mood of blues music. The poem itself becomes a piece of blues music. The dr sound sounds like piano keys

As a poet, he seems to be very aware of death and the intimate relationship his society has with death. Death seems to be a part of everyday life, it looms over him like a shadow, and he again mentions it in this stanza. He seems to be remarking on how he wishes for Julia to be safe from fatal harm and that there are no ghosts to scare her.

Is Julia a real person? Or is Julia his idealization of the perfect woman? He was a vicar so technically, he shouldn't have many, if any, relations with women.

Is he referring here to an actual glow worm?

In this last line we see Herrick's use of liquid/flowing imagery - this seems to be a common motif of his. This imagery he uses emulates his style as a poet and how he sees the world - always changing, always moving, our existence is so brief and finite, like moving water.

The musicality and lyrical aspect of the poem seems to have been lost in the modern translations. In the Middle English version there are more soft vowels especially the "u" sound. When it's translated it has more constants and loses it's audible musicality. Reads more like a poem than a song.

The S is missing here. Do they mean Sing?