hawthorne Young Goodman Brown 165
Young Goodman Brown did not actually see his neighbors. He may have
dreamed it, but it is equally possible that evil spirits fooled him, disguised as his
wife and fellow church members. Whatever happened, the protagonist makes a
case against the townspeople, holding them to a higher standard than he
demands of himself. He feels betrayed, but he was willing to sin, in spite of all
his wavering.
Later, Hawthorne wrote about Herman Melville’s unresolved crisis of faith
that Melville had “pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated; but . . . will
never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief. . . . He can neither believe, nor
be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to
do one or the other.” Puritans agonized over whether they were truly of the elect.
One record tells of a woman who threw her baby into a well, explaining that now
she knew without a doubt that she would go to hell, and the misery of doubt
about her salvation was over.
166 Crime and Justice
TONI CADE BAMBARA
The Lesson (p.878)
Like her young protagonist in “The Lesson,” Toni Cade Bambara remembers a
childhood in which strong female figures educated younger women and girls. In
her book of essays, Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions, Bambara quotes one
mentor, Miss Dorothy: “Colored gal on planet earth . . . know everything there
is to know, anything she/we don’t know is by definition the unknown.” The older
woman teaches the child how to tell stories based on her inner knowledge, and
Bambara says that she “taught me critical theory.” Later, Bambara would recog-
nize the older woman’s advice in her reading. She was taught that stories must
be culture specific, that to speak is to assume responsibility. She learned that her
stories must be based in the narratives of freedom that make up the oral and liter-
ary history of African Americans. Her goal is to “lift up a few useable truths” in
a “racist, hardheaded, heedless society.” Her voice is thus both political and
personal, and she takes seriously the responsibility to pass on what she knows. In
“The Lesson,” the narrator learns, but the reader is taught as well.
Because the voice of the story moves into present tense in the second para-
graph and speaks much as a young girl would speak, the age of the narrator mat-
ters little. She has enough distance to choose her details so that we see her begin
to realize what Miss Moore wants her to learn from the trip to the toy store, and
we see her at the end going off alone to absorb the lesson. Like Paulo Freire,
whose pedagogical theory influenced Bambara, Miss Moore knows that one of
the purposes of education is to wake up those who are oppressed, to make them
see their circumstances so that they can rise up against them. The West African
proverb that it takes a village to raise a child — that the education of children is
the responsibility of everyone with something to share — is central to Bambara’s
philosophy. In the fragmented culture of slavery, this precept became even more
important than it was in Africa before people were forcibly brought to America.
Mothers were often strangers who worked from dawn to dark, and elderly women
too old to go to the fields cared for the children of many mothers. Furthermore,
it was against the law in many states to teach slaves to read and write, so lessons
had to be passed on in any way possible.
Traditions that worked for survival and freedom in desperate times continue
because children need role models and people who will prod them to think. For
many students, Miss Moore’s efforts make her seem like a busybody who inter-
feres in family matters. Bambara, whose experience included many such
women, would disagree. She and other members of the black power and black
arts movements of the 1970s believed strongly that neighborhood programs must
be established to teach children about their heritage and about wrongs that need
redressing. Miss Moore has a political agenda, to show the children the inequal-
ity that will make them angry. Students may suggest that simply pointing out the
problem does not guide the children into finding solutions and does not really
empower them. Miss Moore’s audience rejects much of what she says because
they see no means of acquiring desks for their rooms or microscopes for observ–
ing bacteria. Her distance from them, the air of authority that keeps even the
adults from addressing her by a first name, makes it difficult for her to build
ullen Incident 167
HA JIN
Saboteur (p.884)
Ha Jin’s short story “Saboteur” chronicles Mr. Chiu’s false imprisonment and
subsequent release by Chinese authorities. While Mr.Chiu is accused of being a
saboteur and riling up crowds at Muji Train Station, it is clear from how the story
unfolds that he is innocent of any real crime. He is an academic by training and
clearly unused to imprisonment or ill treatment. In fact, he has been on his hon–
eymoon. He comes across as a little naïve, but since he is ultimately set free and
not seriously harmed, perhaps his confidence is not misplaced. At various points
in the story, he shows his unfamiliarity with imprisonment, asking for reading
material, attempting to throw around the weight of his academic position, and of
course remaining convinced that his university will send someone to his rescue.
RACIAL INJUSTICE: POEMS (p.894)
COuNTEE CuLLEN
Incident (p.894)
Countee Cullen’s poem from 1925 can be placed in the context of a long tradi-
tion of racial incidents involving public transportation. Asian, Irish, and African
workers were exploited — in virtual and sometimes actual slavery — in the
168 Crime and Justice
building of the railway system of the United States, and several years ago lawsuits
demanding reparations were filed against some railway companies because they
purchased or rented the labor of slaves and thus benefited from the institution of
slavery to the detriment of the descendants of these slaves. As transportation
systems developed, regulations kept economic power in place while limiting the
capacity of enslaved people to travel. Nineteenth- century narratives by escaped
slaves tell of heart- pounding experiences: a dark- skinned husband travels as the
servant of a light- skinned wife passing for white on a train going north; a man
escapes to Canada as freight in a packing crate. In both of these examples,
oppressed people subvert the economic structures in which transportation plays
a part. They take advantage of their status as property to steal their own lives from
their “owners.” After emancipation and Reconstruction, Jim Crow laws confined
black riders of trains to crowded cars, often open to dust and soot, that kept them
separate from whites. And later bus and streetcar systems in many cities contin-
ued racial segregation by assigning separate sections to blacks and whites.
In the second line of the poem “Incident,” Cullen gives readers an image of
a fully carefree child whose heart and head are “filled with glee.” By referring to
both intellect and emotion, the poet implies that prejudice works through both
logos and pathos. We are persuaded by what seems to be the logic of prejudice.
For example, the white person who remembers a black woman on the bus pun-
ishing her child for touching a white child might have extrapolated from this and
other representative experiences that black women are violent toward their chil-
dren had she not been provided with an explanation that took into account the
reality of the woman’s situation. Many “logical” arguments surround the subject
of race. Some scholars argue for differences falling along a bell curve that shows
African Americans to be intellectually inferior to Americans of European and
Asian extraction, and other thinkers maintain that the concept of race itself is
based on logically flawed assumptions. That emotions play a large part in the
development of race consciousness is even more evident, with fear, guilt, and
shame playing large roles.
But a child, Cullen implies, is at first unaware of the thoughts and feelings
that prejudice conveys. Although the cliché that children must be taught preju-
dice may be true and may be implied by the second line of Cullen’s poem, it also
is true that in a society with a history of racism, this prejudice must be untaught.
Much prejudice is unconscious and unacknowledged, absorbed from the cul-
ture rather than overtly taught. Eight- year- old children, therefore, have their
innocence taken — from both head and heart — through the agency of other
eight- year- olds.
The child who insults Cullen’s speaker is a “Baltimorean.” The use of this
rather lofty word may be significant in several ways. The effect, taken with the
poem’s singsong rhythm, approaches mock epic. These are children, so their
experiences can be assumed to be trivial, but the word sounds important. Since
mock epic often has a satirical purpose, we may notice that the prejudiced child
is set up as the pompous figure to be taken down. This doesn’t happen in the
poem, however. Instead, the speaker himself is permanently changed and has
been robbed of his “glee” — a silly, naive happiness based on lack of knowledge.
It is also worth noting that the city of Baltimore is near the Mason- Dixon line,
which divides the North from the South.
trethewey Incident 169
NATASHA TRETHEWEY
Incident (p.895)
Natasha Trethewey’s poem is surely autobiographical, dealing with the persecu-
tion that she and the rest of her family suffered because her parents were an
interracial married couple. Quite possibly several of your students will not be
aware that various parts of the United States outlawed such marriages as late as
1967, when theU.S.Supreme Court overturned Virginia’s ban on them. This
case was, ironically, called Loving v. Virginia. Loving was the last name of the
white husband whose marriage to a black woman was at issue. You might have
one or more students research and report on this particular case, especially
because analyses of it (many available on the Web) often refer to the whole his-
tory of statutes against racial intermarriage.
However, it is important for the class not to see Trethewey’s poem as simply
a straightforward personal recollection or a piece of social history. She brings
poetic craft to her subject. Her very title is an invitation to make an intertextual
comparison between her poem and Countee Cullen’s. Moreover, as we note in
our question section following the poem, Trethewey has undertaken to write an
especially challenging kind of verse: a pantoum. Her ability to tackle this ambi-
tious goal does not necessarily make her poem “better” than Cullen’s “Incident,”
but the difference between her intricate design and his deliberately simpler
approach is worth spending much discussion on. Perhaps, by resorting to a tech-
nically daunting form, Trethewey was attempting to put some aesthetic distance
between herself and the experience she recollects here. Because a pantoum
170 Crime and Justice
looks back at earlier lines (repeating them) even as it moves forward, it does seem
an appropriate vehicle for this poem’s content: the speaker is shuttling back and
forth between the past (the episode of the cross burning) and the present (“We
tell the story every year”). Indeed, the poem is not only about the “incident” but
also about how the family has chosen henceforth to remember it. Craft is evident
as well in Trethewey’s use of religious imagery, which comes to seem pointedly
JUSTICE FOR WORKERS: POEMS (p.898)
WILLIAM BLAKE
The Chimney Sweeper (p. 898)
The familiarity of “The Chimney Sweeper” from Songs of Innocence may
explain why some college students miss the biting irony of the poem, reading it
instead as a sentimental expression of making the best of a bad situation because
there will be “pie in the sky bye and bye.” Blake paints the plight of these small
children in stark black and white colors. Tom Dacre has light blond “white” hair
English children often have. In contrast, the soot is black, and the chimneys
themselves are metaphorically (but also realistically) called “coffins of black.” In
Tom’s vision, the green of nature appears, along with the light of the sun, but this
is a dream. After the children “wash in the river,” they are “naked and white;”
the image is joyful, but there’s a touching vulnerability about the image, adding
to the pathos. The rhyme and rhythm of the poem is that of a simple nursery
rhyme, but contrasts with the horror of the images and subject matter. The
repeated “ ‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep!” of the third line rhymes with the next
line, as part of a couplet, but an internal rhyme echoes the sound: weep, sweep,
sleep. The pun should be obvious but is sometimes missed: the child attempts to
say “sweep” but actually calls on the reader to “weep” over the sadness of the
image, carried along by the rhyme to see a toddler sleeping in the soot. The
simplicity of the rhyme scheme emphasizes the innocence of the children, but
it may also lead the reader astray, undercutting the social criticism unless the
levine What Work Is 171
irony is recognized. Blake’s decision to show us two little boys, the speaker and
Tom Dacre, allows the reader to overhear their conversation and to see one try-
ing to comfort the other with his little-boy logic. The speaker does not actually
see the angel that Tom sees, so his report is second-hand. This distance lends a
fable-like quality to the dream, and the “moral” that the speaker adds rings hol-
low, even though both boys may believe it and use it to get through their miser-
able days.
Some readers fall into the trap of thinking Blake agrees with the last line of
the poem. He does not. Any fool can see that harm is coming to these children,
as they can see the emptiness of the couplet in lines 7–8, when the speaker tells
his friend Tom Dacre, “ . . . when your head’s bare, / You know that the soot can-
not spoil your white hair.” Well, sure. If you have no hair, it cannot be spoiled.
PHILIP LEVINE
What Work Is (p.900)
The title of Levine’s poem, “What Work Is,” implies that the text of the poem will
deliver this definition. After careful reading, however, it is clear that although
work is defined as many things, the meaning that is most significant to the narra–
tor has eluded him. At the beginning of the poem, the definition of work appears
simple, something that a person “old enough to read” should know. The more
words the narrator puts into his description, however, the further he moves from
a simple definition. A figure in the line reminds him of his brother, and the time
that brother spends learning German on almost no sleep because he loves to sing
opera. This passion for something the narrator cannot relate to drives him to real–
ize that his work is different from that of his brother and that his inability to con–
nect must mean that there is something he does not understand after all.
Only four lines into the poem, Levine’s narrator says that work is “about
waiting.” This is followed by a description of the men standing in line, hoping to
get a job. There is a man at the end of that line who is also waiting, but this time
waiting reads more like “looming,” and his refusal is unsurprising. There is
another kind of waiting in the poem, one that is not clearly signified. When the
narrator thinks of his brother, he reveals that it has been a long time since they
embraced. That affection is being held in abeyance, hostage to a lack of under-
standing between the pair.
The poem is addressed to “you,” an audience presumed to be equally as
ignorant of the definition of work as the narrator himself. “You” is presented as
someone familiar with standing in line, and with the painfully predictable denial
that lies at the end of the wait. Waiting is synonymous with working for the
172 Crime and Justice
narrator. His brother does not stand in line because of a “sad refusal to give in,”
however. The focus of the brother’s work is so that “he can sing.” The narrator’s
brother is working to pursue his passion, whereas the narrator works because it is
what must be done. Despite the last line in the poem, it seems that it is not the
definition of work that divides the brothers, it is the purpose behind it.
There are several interesting points of comparison between Blake’s and
Levine’s poems.
Protest: Superficially, there is no protest going on in Blake’s poem, as the
innocent-eyed narrator goes out of his way to make the best of bad situation, put-
ting a Pollyanna-ish spin on conditions that appall readers. However, the reader
who recognizes Blake’s irony behind the narrative voice will perceive protest
throughout—against the father who sold his son into labor; against the cold,
filthy, dangerous conditions in which the children work; and especially against
the economic system and its religious apologists. Levine’s protests are more
muted, but they are pervasive. His narrator’s tone veers into testiness, but he
turns the testiness into a kind of self-protest, upbraiding himself for not showing
enough love for his brother, then turning it back outward to the ambiguous
“you” (lines 34–42). He tacitly protests the conditions of standing for fruitless
hours in the rain and against the nature of system that puts men there (although
it’s not difficult to imagine the line he waits in, in other circumstances, being a
protest line of union workers on strike outside a factory), and, existentially,
against work —a metaphor for human frustration and failings.
Waiting: Levine’s notion of “waiting” has a more personal dimension than
the waiting in the Blake poem. The child’s wait for the eventual “pie in the sky
bye and bye” of heaven for good boys is the kind of waiting Blake objects to. His
poem protests against a society that exploits children, and he waits impatiently
for a time when there is justice on earth rather than “heaven.” Levine’s waiting
is literally about lingering in line, but there are other kinds of waiting, such as
his brother’s willingness to wait for work, which allows him to pay for the
German lessons he awaits with eagerness. When the narrator thinks of his
brother, he reveals that he has withheld affection from him for a long time—
another kind of waiting for a moment when he can show his brother love.
Brotherhood: Both poems raise issues of fraternal behavior. From the Latin,
frater (“brother”), fraternity was part of the tripartite motto of the French
Revolution (“Liberté, égalité, fraternité”), which broke out in 1789, the year
Blake’s Songs of Innocence published. The narrator of “The Chimney Sweeper”
takes a brotherly comforting role with Tom Dacre, in keeping with Enlightenment
and Romantic ideas of equality, and Rousseauvian ideas of the generous, uncor-
rupted innocence of children. The relationship of Levine’s narrator with his
brother is, unsurprisingly, more complex. The line he is standing in may be a
line that results from a union “brotherhood” —or the lack of a union “brother-
hood.” The narrator is ambivalent about his brother, feeling an unexpected
“flooding” of love for him, despite distaste for the brother being an opera fan and
lover of “the worst music ever invented.” Work is a metaphor for the work of love
(including that of siblings) and life, of all the things “you” don’t understand, the
complexities of which “you” resist.
heaney Punishment 173
PHILIP SHuLTZ
Greed (p.902)
Philip Shultz’s poem “Greed” invokes all-too-familiar concerns over class, race,
and personal success or achievement. What does society owe individuals? To
what extent are we responsible to one another? Although the poem never men-
tions the word greed, the narrator seems particularly interested in how some
people, the “absent rich,” seem to have it all. For others, financial security end-
ing in retirement is a myth that they themselves perpetuate. The narrator’s own
father bought into the idea that becoming rich one day was his right: “He didn’t
see himself as uneducated, / thwarted, or bitter,” Shultz writes. The speaker calls
“happiness” not “illusion” but rather “precious moments of relief.” The term
illusion suggests that there is something real one has not considered, but
“moments of relief” implies that happiness is, in some ways, like hope. This
redefinition suggests that, rather than suffering from a delusion, one might find
PUNISHMENTS: POEMS (p.905)
SEAMuS HEANEY
Punishment (p.905)
In Northern Ireland where poet Seamus Heaney grew up, large areas are covered
with peat bogs. Heaney tells of being fascinated even as a child with the amazing
variety of objects that fall or are thrown into the bogs only to be found years later,
preserved by the unique chemical properties of the watery, vegetation- rich soil.
He recalls that people would store butter under the peat in the days before refrig-
eration, keeping it fresh for long periods of time. In his earlier poem “Bogland,”
Heaney mentions butter being discovered after hundreds of years still “salty and
174 Crime and Justice
white,” and he describes the quality of the bogland as “itself . . . kind, black but-
ter.” He remembers as a child the recovery of a prehistoric skeleton of a “Great
Irish Elk” from a local bog and the newspaper pictures of his neighbors posing
with the huge antlers.
This land had a habit of remembering, and Heaney himself came to see
history as something that still exists in the present, each object reverberating with
it and each human being echoing a heritage and mythology that does not die. As
a Roman Catholic living in Northern Ireland, Seamus Heaney would have been
hard put to avoid a sense of history and politics. Students may be aware of reli-
gious and political issues that have plagued Ireland for centuries. They may have
read poetry by William Butler Yeats, like Heaney, a Nobel Prize laureate who
wrote about Ireland’s unique culture and history. Some may know about Irish
culture from background reading on James Joyce. Instructors may need to
remind many students of the social and historical context of Heaney’s texts, how-
ever. Heaney’s poem “Punishment” refers to the brutal punishments dealt out to
women who were judged too friendly to men of opposing political or religious
groups in modern Belfast. Irish Republican Army sympathizers have been
known to humiliate women who date British soldiers by shaving their heads,
stripping them, coating them with tar, and then handcuffing them to railings for
public ridicule.
With his knowledge of such politically motivated actions, his contact with
history and mythology, and his personal experience of growing up near the peat
bogs of Ireland, Seamus Heaney’s reading in 1969 of The Bog People by the
Danish archaeologistP.V.Glob led to a powerful convergence of interests that
energized Heaney’s writing. The book contains photographs of preserved bodies
from bogs in various locations in northern Europe. The details that remain of
faces, bodies, and artifacts are stunning. Glob’s book was published by Cornell
University Press in 1969. If the book is available to you, take it to class; nothing
can replace seeing the photographs themselves, and students will understand
why Heaney was impressed by them. Glob sees some of the bog people as
human sacrifices, offered to a pre- Christian earth- mother deity, and Heaney
makes that connection in some poems in his sequence inspired by Glob’s book:
for example, “Bog Queen” and “The Tolland Man.” The poet sees “an arche-
typal pattern” in these deaths and explains in his nonfiction “Feelings into
Words” that the photographs of these ancient victims converge for him with simi-
lar images of “atrocities, past and present, in the long rites of Irish political and
religious struggles” (p.58).
Glob goes to the first- century Roman historian Tacitus for a hint about the
girl who inspires Heaney’s poem “Punishment.” His account describes a situa-
tion chillingly like that of her Irish counterparts. “Tacitus names a special pun-
ishment for adultery by women,” Glob writes, “but says nothing about male
adultery. The adulterous woman had her hair cut off in the presence of her rela-
tives and was then scourged out of the village. This calls to mind one of the bog
people in particular, the young girl from Windeby, in Domland Fen. She lay
naked in her grave in the peat, her hair shaved off, with nothing but a collar of
ox- hide round her neck and with bandaged eyes” (p. 153). Elsewhere in the
book, Glob describes her burial in minute detail, telling us that she was around
fourteen, that her hair was originally light blond and had been chopped off and
heaney Punishment 175
shaven unevenly, that her hands and facial features were “delicate,” and that she
hadn’t been getting enough to eat. Pollen samples show that she was roughly
contemporary with Tacitus. Her woven blindfold would have been bright red
and yellow at the time she died. She wore only this and an oxhide collar. She
had been drowned and covered with birch branches and a large stone. Glob
includes with his description three photographs: one of her body, one of her face,
and one of her remarkably preserved brain (pp.112–14).
Heaney weaves many of the details from the archaeologist’s written and
visual texts into his poem. The scientist’s account is written for a popular audi-
ence rather than for experts; he even includes in his introduction letters from a
group of English schoolgirls interested in his discoveries and dedicates his book
to them and his own daughter, Elsebeth. It is not surprising, therefore, that we
detect empathy in his descriptions. These are real people for him, and we cannot
look at the photographs without feeling their individuality. Seamus Heaney uses
sensory imagery that empathizes even further, evoking the physical sensations
she must have felt, especially the cold. He shows us her fragility; her rib cage is
“frail,” she is “[l]ittle” and “undernourished,” and she is like a “sapling” — a
slender young tree. He shows her as vulnerable, using the word naked and refer-
ring to parts of the body we think of as tender, her “nipples” and the “nape / of
her neck.” She is passive, since we feel and see what is done to her but not what
she does. We feel compassion for her and perhaps a touch of sexual or aesthetic
attraction. The poet does not address her directly until the sixth stanza. This
shifts the perspective somewhat, now focusing on the feelings of the speaker,
while the reader has previously envisioned the girl. This allows a movement in
time. He first projects us into the past and brings the individual victim to life.
After we have felt something for the first- century woman, we are more prepared
to hear the comparison with the political present and the speaker’s status as a
“voyeur,” a silent witness to modern “tribal” vengeance. For Heaney, the bog
woman drowned for sexual transgressions, the Belfast girls tarred for similar
crimes, the speaker of the poem, and the reader who joins him as a bystander are
all part of the same story.
A key to one possible theme for the poem is Heaney’s use of the word scape-
goat in the seventh stanza and his allusion to “stones of silence” in the eighth
stanza. Both are biblical referents that symbolize the shifting of the sins of a
culture to a selected victim. The scapegoat in ancient Israel was a goat driven
into the wilderness, symbolically carrying the evils of the community, as a way of
acting out repentance and absolution. We have come to use the word to refer to
a person or group unfairly punished for the misdeeds of others — “others” often
the person or persons exacting the punishment. The “stones of silence” may refer
to an incident in which Jesus defends a woman accused of adultery, a crime
punishable by stoning. He implies that no one really has the right to judge and
punish the personal behavior of another since no human being can claim moral
perfection. The allusion may also relate to a biblical stoning in Acts 7:58, in
which Saul, not yet transformed into the Apostle Paul by a dramatic conversion
experience, stands by and holds coats as a mob murders the first Christian mar-
tyr, Stephen. The poem’s speaker feels that he engages in a similar complicity in
which he does not fully participate in political violence but understands the
emotions that underpin it. Heaney has lost friends to terrorism, and, as a Roman
176 Crime and Justice
Catholic raised just thirty miles northwest of Belfast, he understands the reason-
ing behind the rage against British occupation and those who go along with it.
But he shows the victim in the bog and her future sisters in Ireland to be incon-
gruously fragile and pathetic targets.
The speaker calls himself an “artful voyeur.” A voyeur is usually defined as
a person who obtains sexual gratification from observing the sexual activities or
the bodies of other people. The reader joins the speaker in looking at the naked
body of the victim. (Who wouldn’t find the image of her nipples as “amber
beads” irresistible?) But we go even further to invade the “darkened combs” — the
valleys — of her “exposed” brain and to inspect her skeleton. In a sense, to read
is to be a voyeur, and to write is to be an artful one. The poet uses her for his art,
and we find pleasure in the images he creates. But whereas the speaker may do
nothing about the violence that he witnesses, this cannot be said of the poet,
since he does not stand idly by. He takes the action of writing the poem. By
exposing our own voyeurism to us, he may challenge us to act.
In the speech Seamus Heaney gave when accepting the Nobel Prize for lit–
erature in 1995, he relates the story of a busload of men stopped by a masked band
of gunmen in Northern Ireland. When the men, presumed to be Protestant ter–
rorists, shouted for the Catholics to step forward, the lone Catholic in the group
felt the passenger next to him squeeze his hand to pull him back with the silent
promise that his Protestant friends would keep his religion a secret. The Catholic
decided to stand up for his faith and stepped forward anyway. He was the only
survivor. The terrorists pushed him to the side and opened fire on the Protestants,
and the Catholic lived to tell of this small gesture of peace. It is this squeeze of
the hand that Heaney calls for, the small sign of friendship and solidarity that
refuses to hand over the scapegoat for condemnation.
In the last stanza of “Punishment,” Heaney admits that the issues that divide
are complex. The poem’s speaker faults himself for being willing to “connive / in
civilized outrage.” The word connive implies an action that disregards or tacitly
consents to a wrongdoing. The word has pejorative connotations. If we called
someone conniving, we would be hurling an insult. But his usage is ironic. He
leaves some question about the act he takes himself to be silently condoning: Is it
the “revenge” that he sees as the wrongdoing? Or is it his own sense of “outrage”
that he sees as a betrayal? Does he connive when he shares the outrage directed
at the woman who has sinned against the community or the world’s outrage
against his fellow Catholics who punish her? The tarring of the woman who has
committed treason by sleeping with the enemy is an act against one’s own — a
“tribal, intimate revenge” that the speaker claims to understand. Though readers
tend to romanticize such relationships as Romeo- and- Juliet situations, we might
have students imagine scenarios in which we saw our nation occupied by an
oppressive enemy. Would we easily forgive someone who willingly formed rela–
tionships with the men who abused our fathers and brothers?
As a writer, Heaney is sometimes criticized for being disloyal to his own
Northern Irish Catholics, failing to take a strong stand against oppression. Others
fault him for raising such political issues in poetry at all. Still, by linking the
treason of the Irish women with the presumably less political adultery of the bog
woman and by painting her with such compassion, Heaney makes the brutality
heaney Punishment 177
toward these women seem to be directed primarily toward their sexual transgres-
sion. Rarely are men punished for having sex that does not involve violence, but
women often are.
Seamus Heaney uses down- to- earth language — no pun intended — to
describe the woman in the bog. Many words are one syllable. He ends the fourth
stanza with the hyphenated “ oak- bone, brain- firkin,” reminiscent of the Anglo-
Saxon rhythms of Beowulf or the inventions of Gerard Manley Hopkins, a favor-
ite poet of Heaney’s. A firkin is a small cask. She is therefore a container for the
brain whose complexity he admires with voyeuristic interest in a later stanza.
Because his diction consists mostly of strong, terse nouns and verbs, the adjec-
tives he does use stand out vividly: naked, amber, frail, drowned, and so forth.
Rather than depending on meter and rhyme, Heaney’s rhythm emerges as a
natural consequence of word choice and content. Much of the sound depends
on subtle assonance and alliteration. Notice in stanza 9, for example, the repeti-
tion of the consonant b and the vowel o, with the deliciously mouth- filling
vocalic echo of combs and bones filling in for formal rhyme. If the poet had
substituted the synonym valleys for the more localized English word combs,
much would have been lost. The single- syllable words of the poem’s first line
literally pull us into the poem, communicating a feeling of forced movement
that exactly fits the sense.
In the poems in this cluster, the punishments seem far more brutal than the
crime would warrant, and all are even more disturbing because they continue after
the victim’s death. Carolyn Forché’s bully in “The Colonel” (p.907) goes beyond
merely killing his opponents to mutilating them and desecrating their memories
with a tasteless show. The women of Heaney’s “Punishment” are stripped naked
before the community, subjected to attacks on their beauty, and held up to public
humiliation. The bog woman is drowned and weighted down, perhaps being sac–
rificed in a religious rite meant to return the community to proper order.
178 Crime and Justice
CAROLYN FORCHÉ
The Colonel (p.907)
Poet and peace activist Carolyn Forché calls her prose poem “The Colonel” a
“documentary poem” and considers her work a “poetry of witness.” We ask stu-
dents to consider the possible reasons for Forché’s use of these terms, exploring
the ways “The Colonel” fits this description. Like a reporter with a video camera,
the political poet records injustices for her audience to view. Although she pro-
vides some commentary, she primarily presents the details of what she sees,
challenging the reader to make judgments about the subject. As a witness, she
passes on the facts and holds them up to the light. She makes no apologies for
having a political purpose, however, and does not pretend — as some writers
might — that she is an objective observer. Like a photographer who aims the
camera, the writer directs our gaze through the details she selects.
But the topics chosen by Forché and other poets who write about social and
political issues strike some American readers as inappropriate to poetry. Perhaps
this is a reaction against moralistic and didactic literature that relegates art to an
inferior position as the means to a political end. Most readers do not believe
Forché’s poetry sacrifices the subtleties of imagery and metaphor for the sake of
her message. They feel that the poetry is more vivid because of its strong purpose.
Forché reminds us that literary artists in many countries occupy a place of influ-
ence and respect, often holding positions of leadership in government or resis-
tance movements. The way she usually tells her story, Forché stumbled into
international affairs, naively landing in El Salvador in 1978 just as war was break-
ing out and later finding herself in Beirut, Lebanon, as strife was heating up
there. The fact is, however, that she has consistently taken stands for human
rights, and as a commentator for public radio and an investigator for Amnesty
International, she often finds herself in hot spots, since these are the places
where human rights are likely to be abused.
In “The Colonel,” Forché describes an arrogant man who would undoubt–
edly judge her work for human rights as without value. He mocks the power of
the poet to accomplish any change that will stop men such as himself: “Something
for your poetry, no?” he says as he shows off his trophies, a batch of severed
human ears. His action seems crude and sophomoric, reminding instructors of
forhé The Colonel 179
students who think they will shock us with lurid descriptions of adventures with
drugs, alcohol, and explicit sex. He is “mean,” both in the word’s connotation of
willingness to cause pain and in its sense of pettiness and poverty of spirit. The
poet uses the natural symbolism of the ears, however, to catch our attention, to
shake us into awareness of present tyranny — “this scrap of his voice” — and to be
alert for approaching tyranny, with our ears “to the ground.” The ending calls us
back to the opening line of the poem, which suggests that we have “heard” some–
thing about the colonel’s brutality and perhaps have dismissed it as folklore. The
poem makes him seem ordinary at first, simply a family man having dinner. But
we soon learn that he is cruel to the extent of turning even his house into a
weapon. The colonel controls and dominates language. He is even compelled to
silence the parrot, and the narrator’s friend warns her to keep quiet as well, know–
ing that the colonel is getting ready to show off his trick with the ears.
Although the narrator’s — and therefore the reader’s — awareness of the
colonel’s barbarity escalates as the poem goes on, we feel his menace from the
beginning lines. For example, the presence of a pistol is juxtaposed with details
of everyday family life and with a poetic metaphor that compares the moon to a
lightbulb in the interrogation room of a prison. As we argue about whether
Forché’s text is really a poem, we should consider its use of metaphor, symbol,
and imagery. The vivid visual image of the ears looking like peach halves and
then coming to life in the water is not lyrical, but it is a simile that has symbolism
and sensory power. Its conversational tone does not preclude its definition as
poetry; compare, for instance, Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” (p.910).
One aspect of poetry is compressed language that distills experience into a
few carefully chosen words. This is therefore a poetic text, and the prose quality
is more a factor of typography than genre. The short sentences could have been
lines. Small groups of students might work together at a computer station to
make “The Colonel” look more like a traditional poem, explaining to the class
their decisions about where lines should end. Part of Forché’s method is to make
this poem of witness a documentation of the egotism and terrible small-
mindedness of a military dictator. Not only does she make it look like prose, but
she justifies margins so that they are perfectly straight, as a legal document would
be. By turning his attempt to shock into a poem that reveals his character, the
poet takes back the power of speech that the colonel seeks to undermine and
control. He has meant the text of the ears to symbolize his power, but the poet
uses it to ask her audience to listen attentively. Her decision to bury his words in
her poem without quotation marks further emphasizes her linguistic coup. His
words are no more important than the television commercial or the parrot’s
meaningless hello. We give him our attention only because we know that he
must be stopped and that others like him must be listened for. Although the story
of the colonel has the ring of folklore, Forché claims that this incident really
happened, that the man was notorious for entertaining dinner guests in this way.
Like narratives about war atrocities, the details seem too outlandish to be true,
and we don’t know whether to believe the author or not. Although it is fair to
assume that the colonel is based on someone the writer met in El Salvador, it is
a good strategy to keep his exact identity generic. Tyrants exist in many times and
places, and the colonel’s universality helps us remember to be alert for them
wherever they crop up.
180 Crime and Justice
HE SAID/SHE SAID: POEMS (p.910)
ROBERT BROWNING
My Last Duchess (p.910)
One of the most anthologized poems in the literary canon, Robert Browning’s
“My Last Duchess” epitomizes the dramatic monologue form and opens up our
class discussion to issues of persona. As an audience of drama, a genre Browning
tried with little success, we easily accept the notion that the actor who delivers the
lines may differ a great deal from the character being portrayed. And in fiction,
readers understand that the narrator and the author are not one and the same. In
poetry, however, students tend to have more difficulty separating the voice we
hear in the poem, usually called the speaker, from the poet. This may be because
we are accustomed to reading confessional poetry or texts inspired by William
Wordsworth’s Romantic dictum that poetry should relate intense emotional expe–
rience “recollected in tranquillity.” When students say that they do not like poetry,
this is often the sort of poetry they mean. Dramatic monologues, with their links
to the soliloquies and dialogues of drama, help students recognize that poetry, too,
may have a fictional element. The Greek word persona originally referred to the
masks worn by actors in classical dramas such as Sophocles’ Antigone (p.923).
When the speaker of the poem is obviously not the poet, we usually refer to the
character we hear speaking in the poem as a persona. Usually, the speaker of a
poem is not called a narrator unless the poem tells a story.
Although Browning’s biography does not play a direct part in the interpreta–
tion of this poem, which presents a persona quite distant from his own personality,
students may find it interesting that the dramatic monologue was an experimental
form in his time. Browning was a bit out of step with other Victorian poets, such
as Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Browning’s wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, was more
popular than her husband for her lyric poetry.
Some scholars have pointed out that the dramatic monologue affords
Browning the safety of speaking indirectly, forcing us to read the implicit mean-
ing hidden beneath the actual words of the poem’s persona. Because we want
our college students to do just this, to go beyond the literal or reductive interpre-
tations of textbook reading to explore less obvious issues in literature, “My Last
browning My Last Duchess 181
Duchess” serves as a good starting point. Browning’s complexity of characteriza-
tion and his colloquial and experimental style have been linked to his literary
ancestors William Shakespeare and John Donne; his contemporary Victorians,
novelists Charles Dickens and George Eliot; and future modernist poets such
asT.S.Eliot and Ezra Pound, who both admired and parodied him. Because
Browning’s speaker suggests to his unseen auditor, the marriage broker about to
get another young woman into a fine mess, that he “read” the portrait of his first
wife, we may further use this poem to discuss the concept of reading a text. We
like to bring in prints of paintings and have students read them from different
perspectives. They can then write descriptions or narratives, think of personal
and intertextual connotations, make aesthetic evaluations, or discuss historical,
sociological, or psychological issues. In class, we look for gaps and oppositions,
consider audience and purpose, and talk about any other interpretive aspects of
reading particular paintings. We define a “text” at this point as anything that can
be read and interpreted, ranging from the anthropologist’s reading of a cultural
group to a jury’s reading of the evidence in a court case to our various interpreta-
tions of literary works in a college literature class. We also explain that although
it may be possible to misread a text, there is seldom only one valid reading of a
given text, and our interpretations often tell us as much about the readers —
ourselves — as they tell us about the text itself. Browning’s poem connects well
with this exercise, since the Duke of Ferrara, as the poet imagines him, seems to
have had his young wife killed because of his reading of her demeanor with other
men. As we listen to his reading, we judge him more critically than we do the
young woman he describes.
The speaker of Browning’s poem is based on the historical Alfonso II, Duke
of Ferrara, who lived in Renaissance Italy in the sixteenth century, at the height
of the flowering of art taking place in that country’s city- states. The duke’s very
young first wife, Lucrezia, died mysteriously in 1561 after just three years of mar-
riage. Soon after her death, the duke began negotiations with representatives of
the Count of Tyrol, whose capital was in Innsbruck, to marry the count’s niece.
Here, the duke is expecting to replace the dead beauty with a count’s daughter.
In the dramatic monologue, we are to imagine the shocked wedding negotiator
as he listens to a cool description of the preceding wife’s shortcomings and the
duke’s response to them. Her sin was what may be a pretty woman’s tendency to
flirt or simply a sweetness and kindness that reaches out to everyone. Her hus-
band feels that such attention should have been saved only for him, and he
seems to have been especially bothered by her pleasure when the portrait artist
complimented her beauty. She was not discriminating enough, he feels. He
insists that it would have been beneath his dignity to have complained about her
lack of decorum or to have given her a chance to explain. There seems to be no
suggestion that she committed adultery or betrayed him in any way, though
somereaders can’t resist blaming the victim, suspecting her of hidden sins. He
tells the marriage broker that it is because she smiled at people more and more
that he “gave commands; / Then all smiles stopped together.” The reader is left
to conclude that the speaker ordered his wife killed because she was cheerful
and friendly to people other than him. Readers familiar with studies on spousal
abuse see symptoms of a typical abuser in the duke. But unlike many abusers,
this man possesses the power to get away with the ultimate abuse of murder.
182 Crime and Justice
Some readers may be reminded of court cases in which wealthy defendants with
skilled lawyers evade punishment. This is not even a question for the Renaissance
nobleman in Browning’s poem, since no one would dare call him to account.
His complaints seem petty and arrogant to most readers, and his discussion of
this topic with the agent of a potential bride’s family has ominous implications.
He’s a scary, menacing man.
Although it is difficult to think of any positive qualities about the duke, some
readers may admire his power and decisiveness. The duke is an art lover, obvi-
ously. But one wonders what happened to the fictitious Frà Pandolf, the artist
Browning imagines creating the portrait of Lucrezia. Titian painted the duke,
but there is no known painting of his young wife. Ironically, the duke now con-
trols who gazes at her beauty; only he pulls the curtain aside. The duke may be
warning the family of his new bride that he will be in complete control this time.
Perhaps the first instinct of the count’s agent is to bolt from the horror of what he
has learned; the duke at one point feels the need to verbally pull him back and
tell him that they should leave together. But another motive for revealing the
painting may be to show off this object of art to the representative of an equally
cultured household; the duke seems just as interested in pointing out the statue
of Neptune by an artist from the count’s own city. This is the duke’s own private
stash of art, for his eyes only, and he thinks of wives in the same terms. The
count’s daughter will simply be an addition to his private collection of aestheti-
cally pleasing objects. The duke speaks of these things matter- of- factly, almost
offhandedly.
The monologue may be read in a conversational tone as one long speech,
as Browning’s choice of keeping it as one undivided stanza invites. Syntax and
meter fight against each other in “My Last Duchess” in a way that submerges
rhyme. If we follow the sense, we do not pause for a full stop at the ends of lines
but let enjambment take us to the end of a sentence, often in the middle of a
line. The poem is written in heroic couplets — that is, two successive lines in
iambic pentameter rhyme with each other. Instructors might want to introduce
definitions of poetic terms as we listen for the effects of Browning’s stylistic
choices. Because a dramatic monologue works best if it sounds as if a real person
were speaking to an unseen listener, the poet may sacrifice some of the lyrical
effects of poetry when he chooses this genre. Many of Browning’s Victorian
contemporaries frowned on what they judged to be his clumsiness. Reading
poetry in the wake of modernists who take their lead from Browning and others
who were willing to be colloquial, and with a post- Whitman appreciation for free
verse, today’s readers usually are not as bothered by the conflict between syntacti-
cal rhythms and counted meter. The dramatic monologue allows Browning to
develop a character who reveals himself through his own words. The poet trusts
his readers to work through the difference between the message of the poem and
the words of the villainous character, just as we deal with the disjunction
between traditional meter and conversational sentence rhythms. As twenty- first-
century readers of a nineteenth- century poem about a sixteenth- century
character, we might expect barriers to understanding.
Students inexperienced with reading poetry sometimes do feel at a loss
when they first read the poem. It helps to provide the sort of context we’ve
touched on here. We could show students a few examples of Renaissance
spera My Ex- Husband 183
portraiture to set the mood. Reading the poem aloud may give the best ground-
ing and allow the instructor to choose an emphasis; for example, the word last
in the title and the first line needs to be read in a way that lets us know another
duchess is waiting in the wings. Once they catch the character of the speaker,
today’s readers recognize the sort of snobbish, self- absorbed person that still exists
and certainly existed in the nineteenth century. Although few men in Browning’s
time had the power of a Renaissance nobleman, we read of many autocrats who
terrorized their wives and children. Later, when Browning would defy Elizabeth
Barrett’s father, he would be dealing with a similar sort of authoritarian man who
felt he owned the women in his family body and soul. The laws in most countries
in the nineteenth century, including the United States, would have allowed or
even encouraged a man to beat his wife. We often read of women today who
arein abusive relationships, “punished” by husbands or boyfriends for actions no
less innocent than Lucrezia’s seem to be. Browning’s duke is more psychologi-
cally interesting than the ordinary bully, however. Rather than lashing out in
anger, he acts in secret, never really approaching his wife with his dissatisfaction
with her. Misplaced pride often keeps a person from revealing true feelings to a
partner, and we often insist that the other person guess what is upsetting us, to
anticipate our needs without our having to “stoop” to express them. Our students
may have stories to share about when this has happened in their relationships,
though it will be easier to recall when others have done it to us than when we
have been guilty of it. Both men and women sometimes build scenarios in their
minds that interpret innocent behavior according to a suspicious narrative they
have imposed on a partner.
GABRIEL SPERA
My Ex- Husband (p.912)
A parody is a form of satire that imitates another work of art, usually to ridicule
it. The best parodies make fun gently. And, imitation being the sincerest form of
flattery, parodies refresh the clichés of works so well known that readers recall
lines by heart but are no longer impressed with the reasons they became popular
in the first place. This is the case with Gabriel Spera’s parody of Robert
Browning’s “My Last Duchess.” Browning’s dramatic monologue is a poem that
tends to be beloved of literature professors but also tends to leave non- English
majors cold. It is difficult to read well, but it fairly demands to be read aloud to
capture the ironic tone, letalone the meaning. Even student readers, however,
should be able to tackle Gabriel Spera’s poem easily. By pairing the Victorian
poem with a late- twentieth- century “remake” of a similar scene, we enhance the
irony of the original and make it more relevant to our students, raising issues
about the nature of loyalty, jealousy, and control.
Like the nobleman in Browning’s poem, the female speaker in “My Ex-
Husband” has been disappointed in marriage and has taken action to get rid of
a spouse. She obviously speaks to a date, possibly a lover or a prospective new
husband, because she mentions not having a picture of him as if she should have
one. Although we have only her word for it, her husband seems to have been
shamelessly unfaithful. She — or Claus, her lawyer — has persuaded a judge to
184 Crime and Justice
grant her a divorce and a settlement, so her evaluation of her former spouse has
been believed by some people. We actually have no way of knowing whether the
man cheated, and we may not even be persuaded that she herself really believes
he did, though she seems so worked up about it that it seems likely that she does
believe it. Still in the grip of jealousy, the speaker is not a reliable narrator, since
she may not be thinking clearly. She keeps his photograph on the shelf, a sign
that she still has not separated her emotions from him. And she spews out her
continuing anger at her ex- husband to her guest, evidence either that she is
obsessed or that she seeks to justify her divorce. Although she says she is deter-
mined not to be stuck, she seems stalled at this point, unable to recover from the
aftereffects of her husband’s public philandering, and the pattern of repetition in
the poem reflects this. When she speaks of not being stuck, she moves away from
the true rhyme of the couplet form she borrows from Browning, attempting to
rhyme stick and stuck. In fact, the first move away from the pattern occurs earlier,
in lines 31 and 32, when she attempts to rhyme shit and which. There is enough
consonance in the short i sounds and the slight echo of a t to make this pairing
qualify as a near rhyme, but it startles not only because of the diction but also
because it veers so unexpectedly away from the expected rhyme. She is clearly
upset, unable to maintain control.
As we have pointed out when discussing Browning’s dramatic monologues,
the persona of “My Last Duchess” is different from the poet himself. This fact is
even more obvious in “My Ex- Husband” because the poet is a man but the
speaker is a woman. Student readers often object that there must be some evil in
a writer able to create such perverse narrators as Browning’s Duke of Ferrara or
Jonathan Swift’s reasonable proponent of cannibalism in “A Modest Proposal.”
Conceivably, the argument could be made that Spera is able to write a woman’s
words because he has feminine qualities. But is it so difficult to accept that we
can invent characters who are very different from ourselves, just as good actors
can portray a variety of roles? Do we imagine, for example, that Anthony
Hopkins is really like Hannibal Lector? We might ask students to consider play-
wrights who are able to create many different sorts of convincingly three-
dimensional characters in one work of drama. However, we might also consider
the issue of whether Spera gets it right. Sometimes writers crossing gender lines
fail to create characters who ring true. Has the writer perhaps imagined the ste-
reotype of an angry ball- buster rather than capturing a wife’s deeper feelings?