where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter
... but the poetry isn't fun anymore. Is he saying that the times they are living in, the scene, has gotten old and stale? This is truly tragic, Ginsburg was still a young man when he wrote this. The imagery is all apocalyptic. Where did his life go from here?
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgement! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch, the pagan god who demands human sacrifice, this is one of the best descriptions of him that I've seen. This line puts me in mind of today's political scene. 'Moloch whose buildings are judgement!' But both the left and the right think this about each other.
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of the Bowery,
Ginsburg swaps out hallucinatory drug references for crappy sounding food. Is this his way of saying that he's fed up, had all that he can stand?
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,
Stanza six and this one put me in mind of the 'tune in, drop out' thing in the early sixties. Drs. Timothy Leary and Ram Das and the like. I wonder if this is what is being referenced here.
I talked to a fellow, an’ the fellow say, “She jes’ catch hold of us, somekindaway. She sang Backwater Blues one day: ‘It rained fo’ days an’ de skies was dark as night, Trouble taken place in de lowlands at night. ‘Thundered an’ lightened an’ the storm begin to roll Thousan’s of people ain’t got no place to go.
So Ma has the kind of raw appeal that the powerful seems to do to the weak. Randy Newman's 'The Lord's song,' "I take from you your children and you say how blessed are we." Ma sang a familiar, to them, blues song and they knew what was coming. They were all displaced. She foretells catastrophe, and they love her for it.
O Ma Rainey, Sing yo’ song; Now you’s back Whah you belong, Git way inside us, Keep us strong. . . . O Ma Rainey, Li’l an’ low; Sing us ’bout de hard luck Roun’ our do’; Sing us ’bout de lonesome road We mus’ go. . . .
Ma Rainey is special in the way anybody is who changes your outlook on life. She "Git way inside us, Keep us strong...," She's not actually taking them anywhere, but convincing them that their suffering is worth something. This all matters. She's telling them what they already know, but in a more rousing way. Televangelism!
Darkly I gaze into the days ahead, And see her might and granite wonders there, Beneath the touch of Time’s unerring hand, Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.
Why "Darkly"? Is it because he sees everything that has been built and accomplished inevitably being washed away by time, like Shelley's Ozymandias, or is the might and granite his own youthful, but ultimately fading idealism?
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth. Her vigor flows like tides into my blood, Giving me strength erect against her hate, Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood.
This guy has all the foolish valour that goes with youth. He relishes the fight. He is still young and stupid enough to believe that he could actually win someday. This is why we cherish youth. Here is the timelessness of David v. Goliath.
I shall return to hear the fiddle and fife Of village dances, dear delicious tunes That stir the hidden depths of native life, Stray melodies of dim remembered runes.
"I shall return," but then the speaker speaks of "dim remembered runes." Runes are commonly used, like tarot cards, to predict the future. Deja Vu is defined by some, as remembering a present event even while it is happening. A common string seems to be an ambivalence about things really changing much.
I shall return, I shall return again, To ease my mind of long, long years of pain.
There is an inevitable contrast between the poem's last lines and its first. "I shall return, I shall return again, to ease my mind of long, long years of pain," the commas make this one sentence and one thought or idea. At the beginning, "I shall return again; I shall return to laugh...," both flips the 'again' line, but the semi-colon is essentially combining two different things, as if to say, we keep returning to this.
Ah, stern harsh world, that in the wretched way Of poverty, dishonor and disgrace, Has pushed the timid little feet of clay, The sacred brown feet of my fallen race! Ah, heart of me, the weary, weary feet In Harlem wandering from street to street.
It is as if the speaker is of two minds here, standing outside of himself. He speaks of the former dignity of a "fallen race," they have "sacred brown feet" and at the same time, "feet of clay," typically, indicating an edifice with a weak foundation which cannot endure the test of time. "Ah, stern harsh world, that in the wretched way...," implies for me that this is just the way of the world.
“Harlem Shadows” (1922) I hear the halting footsteps of a lass In Negro Harlem when the night lets fall Its veil. I see the shapes of girls who pass To bend and barter at desire’s call. Ah, little dark girls who in slippered feet Go prowling through the night from street to street!
Okay, there's a lot to unpack here. ABABCC. Aptly named, 'Harlem Shadows.' Even in 'Negro Harlem' there is a veil that hides still darker things. The speaker sees the 'shape' of girls who pass, though makes no mention of their features, nor otherwise, who they are. They 'go prowling' like a cat in search of prey.
Or does it explode?
Food Reference: if you buy a McDonalds' milkshake, and leave it out in the sun on a hot day, the shake will eventually swell the container and explode. Once again, Hughes poetry appears somewhat prophetic. Shortly after this was written, the slow burn began to explode; the integration of the U.S. Army, black admissions to state schools, Malcolm X and Dr. King Jr., George Wallace and JFK, etc. "Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor."
Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore— And then run?
Let's see Neil DIamond turn this into a song. Where's the optimism of the other pieces? Hughes used to write about jazz and the blues. Music gets in through the ears. Now it's all food references. They get in through taste and smell. "And then run?," Is he saying that his dream has run away? He seems to have gone from appreciating the experience of the weary blues to becoming the 'blues man.'
The stars went out and so did the moon. The singer stopped playing and went to bed While the Weary Blues echoed through his head. He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.
Leaves you with the question: is this one sad night in the blues man's life, "The stars went out and so did the moon," or a compression of time emblematic of his entire sad existence? "He slept like a rock or a man that's dead," Hughes seems to be telling us that he got out all of his blues for tonight, or they took his number off the wall and he died of the blues. Cruel of the poet not to give us a definitive answer.
Droning a drowsy syncopated tune, Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon, I heard a Negro play. Down on Lenox Avenue the other night By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light He did a lazy sway . . . He did a lazy sway . . . To the tune o’ those Weary Blues.
Is this poetry or lyricism? Hughes, perhaps the eternal optimist, writes about a depressed 'blues man' in anything but a bluesy style. You can actually clap your hands to this, I tried it! This will anger some, but it puts me, contemporary white guy, in mind of some of Neil Diamond's 'lyrics' from his middle period (early eighties).
Tomorrow, I’ll be at the table When company comes. Nobody’ll dare Say to me, “Eat in the kitchen,” Then.
Hughes jumps ahead without preamble to now (perhaps?): the word 'Racism' may have only been in common usage with Sociologists when this poem was originally penned, today however, ordinary middle class folks, even of minority status, make self conscious gestures to stay away from that label. I see it in the workplace, the marketplace, and even in how legitimate criticisms were leveled at our last president. The relegation of the African American to second class status remains, but it is more covert. Does this mean that we are half way to fulfilling Hughes' prophecy?
I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen When company comes, But I laugh, And eat well, And grow strong.
One of the underlying themes of Hughes' essay, was that the American Negro already has a rich, if unrecognized heritage to contribute to the U.S. The American Dream! Nothing to be ashamed of, everything we need... for now. These lines anticipate hope in a brighter future. "And grow strong."
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
This is what singer/songwriter, Harry Chapin, would have called 'using the bass to fill the bottom in.' The line is used after stanza one, but after the very next stanza; Euphrates, Congo, Nile, etc., "My soul has grown deep like the rivers" really drives it home.
I bathe in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans,* and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
Don't know if it was L. Hughes or other poets who originated the imagery here, i.e. Associating the Euphrates with the world being young, etc, but some of it has become almost too familiar. Interesting though, is the author's use of both the raising of the pyramids, Abe Lincoln, and the Mississippi, all associated with captive labor toiling to raise up something grand or being sold down... as in 'sold down the river.'
We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.
Unfortunately, this idea works better in theory. It found its biggest expression during the 1960s 'Black is Beautiful' phenomenon. But it didn't last, and some of the most copied features of it, were resented by pre-baby boom black people as being contrived, not really evocative of the authentic American Negro experience. When women burned their bras, an homosexuals turned Gay, they probably had a lot more lasting success than when Negroes became African American.
A prominent Negro clubwoman in Philadelphia paid eleven dollars to hear Raquel Meller sing Andalusian popular songs. But she told me a few weeks before she would not think of going to hear “that woman,” Clara Smith, a great black artist, sing Negro folksongs. And many an upper -class Negro church, even now, would not dream of employing a spiritual in its services. The drab melodies in white folks’ hymnbooks are much to be preferred. “We want to worship the Lord correctly and quietly. We don’t believe in ‘shouting.’ Let’s be dull like the Nordics,” they say, in effect.
With respect, isn't the author being a little hard on these hard working people? I think I take his point, but let's be realistic. The last time I was in Carmel, Ca., an obviously overwhelmingly white community, I overheard a black man, one of the very few there, saying to a young peer, "When you do that... This is what white folks think... And when they hear you say..." He was giving his young charge lessons on how to get by in his own country. Meanwhile, the European tourists visiting the town, feel so at home there that they literally walk right off the curbs into oncoming traffic, like they're at Disneyland. The Carmelites want to have a lot in common with the Nordics; but aren't interested in whether the two black guys feel at home, even though they live there and pay their taxes. Maybe that's what it's like to be overwhelmed by a dominant culture.
Therefore the Negro today wishes to be known for what he is, even in his faults and shortcomings, and scorns a craven and precarious survival at the price of seeming to be what he is not. He resents being spoken for as a social ward or minor, even by his own, and to being regarded a chronic patient for the sociological clinic, the sick man of American Democracy.
'The New Negro' doesn't wish to be done for, not even by his own. Wasn't this always the case though? Perhaps, the author is selling the 'Old Negro' short. Years ago, while working as a union rep. I encountered a little of this. The angry black workers resented having a white rep speak up and handle their grievances. That was how the system was set up.
The intelligent Negro of today is resolved not to make discrimination an extenuation for his shortcomings in performance, individual or collective; he is trying to hold himself at par, neither inflated by sentimental allowances nor depreciated by current social discounts. For this he must know himself and be known for precisely what he is, and for that reason he welcomes the new scientific rather than the old sentimental interest. Sentimental interest in the Negro has ebbed. We used to lament this as the falling off of our friends; now we rejoice and pray to be delivered both from self-pity and condescension. The mind of each racial group has had a bitter weaning, apathy or hatred on one side matching disillusionment or resentment on the other; but they face each other today with the possibility at least of entirely new mutual attitudes.
This remains current. In 2001, a black social critic put the question to his peers, "are you sure that you want compensation from the white community at large?' That compensation, reparations for descendants of former slaves, might come in the form of money, vouchers for higher education,etc. His point was that once you receive compensation, the white community will consider all past injustices accounted for, and will tell the black community to stop whining. The social critic raised a powerful issue and there was no clear consensus at that gathering.
Dead navies of the brain will sail stone celebrate its final choice when the air shakes a single voice a strong voice able to prevail:
'We have nothing to give but our lives.' "Entrust no hope to stone...," all the graves of those martyred for liberation will eventually be as iconic as our first president's monument. Eventually. Though not in anybody's lifetime.
but nevertheless, they shut off his gas; nevertheless, the bank foreclosed; nevertheless, the landlord called; nevertheless, the radio broke;
Reminiscent of 'Here lies, and none mourn him,' You go and go, but does any of it matter? The two have a similar patter.
Maybe the big boy’s coming back, there’s a million boys that want to come back with hell in their eyes and a terrible sock that almost connects. They’ve got to come back, out of the street, out of some lowdown, lousy job or take a count with Dempsey.
Here is the infamous 'long count' that cost Jack Dempsey his title against Gene Tunney. Dempsey represented the working man, the little guy, who had previously taken down a giant, Jess Willard. Tunney, on the other hand, was a pretty boy who spouted poetry when he wasn't cutting an opponent to ribbons.
Comrades here is my hand! Here’s all of me, my friends, brothers in arms and fellow builders! We together through the long transition marching will notch the trees along the way.
The structure seems to break with the rest of the poem. Is this poetry or political pamphleteering, or both?
What is that sound high in the air Murmur of maternal lamentation Who are those hooded hordes swarming Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
This must have been a common theme, or archetype, in life around that time. My GrandMother dream't a cowled figure knocking on her door one night. She slammed the door, refusing to let it in, but to no avail, the very next evening they found the body of her youngest son in the forest. It seemed, he had tried, and failed, to beat an oncoming train that would've delayed his journey back home for the night. It haunts our dreams, but in the morning we don't remember.
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit There is not even silence in the mountains But dry sterile thunder without rain There is not even solitude in the mountains But red sullen faces sneer and snarl
What good is silence if you don't have time to stop and think or contemplate? Even the thunder is unproductive here, not bringing life giving water with it.
Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead, Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell And the profit and loss. A current under sea Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell He passed the stages of his age and youth Entering the whirlpool. Gentile or Jew O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
But was it the water that drowned him or just life itself that took him down?
The time is now propitious, as he guesses, The meal is ended, she is bored and tired, Endeavours to engage her in caresses Which still are unreproved, if undesired. Flushed and decided, he assaults at once; Exploring hands encounter no defence; His vanity requires no response, And makes a welcome of indifference.
I am reminded of an incident just after the close of WWII. An American G.I., aged 87 at the telling, gave a young German girl a pair of stockings in exchange for sex, then walked her home because he worried about her safety. His assignment was to keep order in the bombed out city. The girl's eyes must have looked glassy and dead already. But this was the trophy that he got for being on the winning side. The young girl was paying her nation's due for losing. The war veteran's wife, 86 at the telling, was jealous at hearing her husband talk of sex with another woman; neither of them were prepared to discuss what that incident must have done to the desperate young girl's soul. War creates a logic all it's own.
And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors; Departed, have left no addresses. By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept . . . Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song, Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long. But at my back in a cold blast I hear The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.
Perhaps an awareness of his own mortality: friends, loiterers leave no addresses because they have none; what would they have to tell the writer anyway. His mortality and impermanence is being measured against the timeless flow of the Thames.
at last, took him for their friend and adviser.
They say, 'you can pick your friends but you can't pick your family.' What a load! Most of the time you don't really get to pick either. You're born with your family and your friends are your peers in whatever neighborhood your family dooms you to be in. This poor school physician, he has to be friends with these losers with lice in their hair. And all because he got C's in medical school.
By constantly tormenting them with reminders of the lice in their children’s hair,
This is all about the irony or being somewhere when we'd rather be somewhere else. A doctor once told me that whether you get a C or an A in medical school, they still have to call you 'doctor.' This poor schmuck ended up here.
Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold
He, notice how I just assume that it's a 'He,' doesn't mean a word of it. He doesn't need to be forgiven. He's just saying that he did it. That much is laudable, kind of like when Geo. Washington cut down the cherry tree. "Father, I cannot tell a lie..." I'm telling you, this poem could have been written by Pres. Trump.
I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox
I guess we were coming to it. These words would have been spoken by our current president, if he were more poetic, and less verbose. 'This is just to say' are the words of someone who is unbowed. Notice that there is no apology here. I did it! If that makes me a dick, so be it!
as if the earth under our feet were an excrement of some sky
America is an experiment. Whether it be wild Kentucky or Jersey, we're not shit and we didn't come from shit either. Our best days are always ahead of us. If you're a citizen of France or Italy, you have to be French or Italian, but to be an American, you just have to come here... and be wild!
to be tricked out that night with gauds from imaginations which have no peasant traditions to give them character but flutter and flaunt
I've said it before, having the heritage of being an American, means that we have no parentage. When we revolted, we cut that part of ourselves off. No more peasant traditions. No more traditions. Our history of slaving robbed the former slaves of that as well. We're all slatterns now.
Go in fear of abstractions. Do not retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose. Don’t think any intelligent person is going to be deceived when you try to shirk all the difficulties of the unspeakably difficult art of good prose by chopping your composition into line lengths.
This is one of the best pieces of advice on writing good poetry that I've ever read. Who is this guy anyway. A friend of mine, a published poet, once told me that a poem is really just a story in five lines, but this paragraph really fills that in.
It is the presentation of such a “complex” instantaneously which gives that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art.
I wish I had more time to experience this one paragraph. When you know... you know! 'I saw Mommy kissing Santa Claus,' ' I found the love letters,' I read Shelley's 'Ode to the West Wind.' For good or evil, something comes alive and you can't put it back to sleep.
Direct treatment of the “thing” whether subjective or objective.
But how does one ever really do this? Try looking away from yourself in a mirror or on a security camera at CVS. Once you get a good look, you have to look away to be subjective or objective. But you can't. It is the train wreck that is you.
Criticism is not a circumscription or a set of prohibitions. It provides fixed points of departure. It may startle a dull reader into alertness. That little of it which is good is mostly in stray phrases; or if it be an older artist helping a younger it is in great measure but rules of thumb, cautions gained by experience.
I do not know the age of the poet, Pound, when he wrote this particular piece, however, this would be good advice from a father to a son. That is, if your father was a poet, mine wasn't. So he said something like, 'if you get yourself in trouble, then just get yourself out!' In the end, there really are no prohibitions in a free society, just rules of thumb. Sartre said that we are all doomed to our freedom, or he said something like that anyway.
The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.
I feel like anything I say will be too wordy. Once again, we have a preoccupation with design, or perhaps, pattern is a better word. Have you ever been a singles bar? They're all just apparitions until you get a 'hit.' I know the poet's not talking about the single scene but how often do I get to hang out in the Metro....
All will be easier when the mind To meet the brutal age has grown An iron cortex of its own.
Edna appears to be questioning her own conclusion. Is toughening up and coarsening the soul really the answer? I dare say, if that had worked for her, would she have been able to write such beautiful verse? Still, Edna, funky name.
May pierce me–does the rose regret The day she did her armour on?
Sorry, but I think of Jethro Tull; "He's a lover of life, but a player of pawns..." 'did he who made the lamb make thee! Alan Watts 'Two Hands of God.' Life comes with two sides. Always
Man, doughty Man, what power has brought you low, That heaven itself in arms could not persuade To lay aside the lever and the spade And be as dust among the dusts that blow?
I had an acquaintance who hanged himself in the county lockup while awaiting a two to fifteen mandatory sentence. It was two to fifteen because there was a firearm involved. The gun was one that he stole from the crime scene itself. It was his parents' house and they were willing to drop the charges. No can do! 'What power has brought you low,' Strive not to speak,poor scattered mouth; I know.
Cut down, and all the clamour that was he, Silenced; and all the riveted pride he wore, A rusted iron column whose tall core The rains have tunnelled like an aspen tree.
"Stop the car," one of my teen aged peers yelled, then got out of the backseat and jumped off a bridge. Nobody knew why. He didn't leave a note or anything. Life hollows you out... like an aspen tree. It can happen at any age. One day there's clamor, and the next, there really isn't any reason to go on.
I might be driven to sell your love for peace, Or trade the memory of this night for food.
Where? On the open market? I have been fortunate enough to have had a few of these experiences. I wouldn't trade any of them. They are what Plato talked about with his star crossed ideas about perfect form. Those nights, and days, come down to us, from that place of perfect forms and give us a brief, all too brief, glimpse of Heaven. Edna, funky name though!
Yet many a man is making friends with death Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
Remember that hilarious line from that song, whose title and lyricist whose names I cannot remember: 'Money can't buy everything, it's true, but what it can't buy I can't use.' All kidding aside, people do die from lack of love. Somebody very close to me died from this recently. He had everything, materially speaking, but he couldn't accept the flawed, imperfect love that was available. I know you wont believe me but it literally killed him.
Make the whole stock exchange your own! If need be occupy a throne, Where nobody can call you crone.
I am reminded of the 1980s pres. race in which televangelist Pat Robertson ran on the Republican side. He started saying all of this outrageous stuff and the media fact checkers had a field day. It was pointed out though that when he was on his own show, the 700 CLub, broadcast by his own satellite,Pat could say anything that he liked. Nobody questioned him, nobody dared.
The picture pride of Hollywood. Too many fall from great and good For you to doubt the likelihood.
This is 1936, Hollywood is in the process of creating some of its most enduring classics, also it is introducing to the world some of its most beautiful stars. Already though, some of them have fallen by the wayside. If you can't stay pretty, become respectable, stately, powerful.
What but design of darkness to appall?– If design govern in a thing so small.
Oh sure, blame God! The poet goes from observer here, to just another cynical human. There is not only design in the arachnid's eight legs v. the insect's six, there is also design (perhaps?) in the fact that the moth seems to be drawn to the very thing which leads to its demise.
I found a dimpled spider, fat and white, On a white heal-all, holding up a moth Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth — A
The title really says it all. He is noticing the design in all things. There is design in both the spider and the moth; the predator and its prey; the spider's web and the fluttering wing, all that's left of the moth after it is eaten.
he woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep,
Time, our most precious commodity, is wasting. There's nothing here to justify him staying. There is no purpose, nothing to gain or achieve. The 20th century is all about industry and bending nature to our will. We could clear these woods and build a mall.
Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow.
AABA til the last stanza, interesting. The Great War is safely over and the victors 'own' things, but not where they live. Whose property is this anyway? Even his horse knows that they had better keep moving.
nd both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.
Not to be too much of a wise ass here, but when Henry Miller did this he ended up in Europe with Anais Nin... and June. 'I doubted if I should ever come back.' There are some decisions that you can't come back from. This is really the whole point, isn't it.
And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same,
His curiosity here is really getting the better of him.... Before he even knows there is a decision to be made, he is pondering it. I can see him getting up on his toes and leaning as far as he can to peer down the less taken path. Think of it, what's down there? I've never gone that way. Has anyone?
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill; And on a day we meet to walk the line And set the wall between us once again. We keep the wall between us as we go. To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
Interesting that this was written at the start of the Great War. Then, the world seemed to be rearranging its boundaries. 'has seen them made or heard them made,' 'He is all pine and I am apple orchard,' there is an almost musical cadence to the lines in this piece.
What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness, Anger, discontent and drooping hopes? Degenerate sons and daughters, Life is too strong for you– It takes life to love Life.
Lucinda is the flip side of the coin from Seth and Petit. She seems to say, "if your'e not happy here then why did you stay?" 'Degenerate,' those others were weak, lacking the backbone to live the life that Spoon River mean't us to live.
Rambled over the fields where sang the larks, And by Spoon River gathering many a shell, And many a flower and medicinal weed– Shouting to the wooded hills, singing to the green valleys.
What a different picture of this little oppressive, backward hamlet we get from Lucinda. She is perfectly happy here, free as a lark. For her, the town is just enough. Spoon River is for the self contained and the strong.
For I could never make you see That no one knows what is good Who knows not what is evil; And no one knows what is true Who knows not what is false.
The town of Spoon River appears to offer its residents, and us, a pretty good mix of both: small towns are typically more intimate; everybody knows everybody, they move at a slower pace; nothing much changes, and they have predictable rituals and customs; these are the good ol' days. Small towns can also be oppressive places, in which the only way to change or grow is to move away.
WHEN I died, the circulating library Which I built up for Spoon River, And managed for the good of inquiring minds, Was sold at auction on the public square, As if to destroy the last vestige Of my memory and influence.
The poet is aware that, for some, books are not well appreciated because they take the reader outside of their immediate environs, encouraging them to have opinions and values that aren't considered necessary by those in power.
While Homer and Whitman roared in the pines?
Yes, and they are most likely laughing at you right now. In some way, this is the one line that seems to me somehow out of place. It takes us out of the poem, after all, what does Homer and Whitman have to do with the poet's little town? Awkward! As if the poet doesn't trust his reader to get the point.
Triolets, villanelles, rondels, rondeaus, Ballades by the score with the same old thought: The snows and the roses of yesterday are vanished; And what is love but a rose that fades?
The past brings only safe old memories. 'A rose that fades,' there may be a dual meaning here: predictable, but safe poetry and plot lines, or the literal sense of not being able to retain a vanished past. The memories, 'triolets, villanelles, etc.' aren't so much safe as they are stale.
Old Eben Flood, climbing alone one night Over the hill between the town below And the forsaken upland hermitage
Just a feeling I get, 'Old Eben' isn't coming back! The first lines are really the last. The imagery is all of death: climbing over a hill, the town is below him, and a forsaken hermitage, where people go to be alone. Eben is ready to tip over the jug.
Then, as a mother lays her sleeping child Down tenderly, fearing it may awake, He sat the jug down slowly at his feet With trembling care, knowing that most things break; And only when assured that on firm earth It stood, as the uncertain lives of men Assuredly did not, he paced away, And with his hand extended paused again:
Things break! For Eben, the bird is on the wing. At his ripe age, he knows that things that we care about get broken. We learn a lot about Eben from this one stanza: He has lost things that he cares about. In fact, the town where he has spent his life doesn't really know or welcome him anymore. Certainly, many of his friends and family have gone away; however, pay close attention to the ending lines in the last stanza, was there something that Eben himself did to drive the townsfolk to shut their doors to him?
I did not think that I should find them there When I came back again; but there they stood, As in the days they dreamed of when young blood Was in their cheeks and women called them fair.
Who is the "I" doing the narration? He seems to be a peer and an outside observer at the same time. It's kind of like when you run into an old friend from high school and wonder, 'was I really like that?' "Poets and kings are but the clerks of time,"; time, however, seems to have given the observer a sense of alienation.
Be content to be servants, and nothing more; what need of higher culture for half-men? Away with the black man’s ballot, by force or fraud,—and behold the suicide of a race! Nevertheless, out of the evil came something of good,—the more careful adjustment of education to real life, the clearer perception of the Negroes’ social responsibilities, and the sobering realization of the meaning of progress.
This is going to sound strange, maybe even offensive, but here goes: the American black man, "American Negro" has no father. That is what the author speaks about here. Other minorities, who got here by other means, were able 'collectively', to get ahead. The other minorities had some kind of support system available to them. For the American black person, the subservience and limitations come built in. Life just keeps rolling over them. Former boxing champ, George Foreman, named all of his kids 'George', even the girls, so that they would know who their father was, cuz he didn't! I think that is what Du Boise is alluding to here.
The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land. Whatever of good may have come in these years of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon the Negro people,—a disappointment all the more bitter because the unattained ideal was unbounded save by the simple ignorance of a lowly people.
"Freedom's when you put the cage in Harlem. Freedom's when you put the cage in Hough..."--- Randy Newman. The author writes about a job left unfinished. Slavery, the Civil War, Emancipation, the Restoration; but the former slaves didn't even have last names, they were given names of their former 'owners' or the counties that they had resided in before their freedom was won. How did the author end up with a name like Du Boise?
Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.
The author seems to say that he got the better end of the deal because he, early on, adopted the 'living well is the best revenge' coping strategy. On the other hand, his peers in race just grew sullen and angry. In my native country, Ohio, white people often said "We're okay with the black race, after all, they couldn't help that they were born that way"
The pen works for itself, and acts like a hand, modelling the plastic material over and over again to the form that suits it best. The form is never arbitrary, but is a sort of growth like crystallization, as any artist knows too well; for often the pencil or pen runs into side-paths and shapelessness, loses its relations, stops or is bogged.
... and enslaves you 'til you work your youth away."---Don Mclain. Sorry, I had to. The expression, 'the pen is mightier than the sword,' comes to mind here. What I mean is, the dynamo 'the force', Venus, Eve, the VIrgin, are rapidly losing interest for twentieth century mind. But the author seems to sense here that something truly vital is lost. When the first couple is expelled from the Garden, the Lord clothes them in animal skins. Animal skins. We aren't told where the Lord got the skins, neither is it made explicit why skins and not, say, a house... with central air. Thomas Aquinas might have preferred the house but King David or Odysseus would have wanted the skins. And they both know why.
The Woman had once been supreme; in France she still seemed potent, not merely as a sentiment, but as a force. Why was she unknown in America? For evidently America was ashamed of her, and she was ashamed of herself, otherwise they would not have strewn fig-leaves so profusely all over her.
Perhaps, apropos of nothing/ something, singer/ songwriter 'Don Henley was had a frenchman say that women were the only works of art. Bathsheba, Helen of Troy, and Cleopatra, all understood seduction, the power to seduce, as a force. They were living dynamos in a time when women had no power and most men possessed very little. The author is correct, twentieth century American woman would have been hopelessly inadequate to topple Adam with a piece of fruit.
The rays that Langley disowned, as well as those which he fathered, were occult, supersensual, irrational; they were a revelation of mysterious energy like that of the Cross; they were what, in terms of mediæval science, were called immediate modes of the divine substance.
This is reminiscent of The Futurist Manifesto in certain respects; however, it differs in that the Futurists' author seems to lose all respect for what he termed 'an ancient mythology' or some such. Whereas, the current piece seems to see the 'ancient mythology' continuing to roll on right into the twentieth century.
Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies,
Growing up in a small Ohio town, it is nearly impossible for me to relate to this much bottled up anger.
burlap sacks
sac race when I was a kid. Dates the poem.