Literature Chapter 11 Homework The python is usually taken to represent an

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Chapter 11

Crime and Justice (p. 882)

JUSTICE FOR ANIMALS: POEMS (p. 884)

D. H. LAWRENCE

Snake (p. 884)

Students interested in exploring the deeper meanings of D. H. Lawrence’s “Snake”

will find many critical studies. Because the snake is a phallic symbol in many cul-

tures—even to some ways of thinking an archetypal symbol connected universally with

male sexuality—the poem invites Freudian readings, and undergraduates are often

surprised to find analyses of Lawrence’s Oedipus complex as they look for interpreta-

tions of the poem. A reading of his novel Sons and Lovers may convince them that this

is a reasonable assumption, though some Lawrence scholars contend that he had writ-

ten his way through the worst of his feelings about his father by the time he wrote

“Snake” on a trip to Sicily in 1913. In a personal letter, Lawrence himself once wrote

that human beings are freed by “phallic consciousness . . . [which is] the root of poet-

ry, lived or sung.” For Lawrence, sex was at the core of everything human, and such

interpretations can usually be supported with ample evidence.

Critic Ross Murfin maintains that it is impossible for Lawrence or any other writer

after John Milton’s Paradise Lost to view a snake without making a conscious or

subconscious intertextual connection with the biblical serpent and Satan. Murfin sees

Lawrence as unsuccessfully trying to break free of this and other cultural connotations

to interact with the snake in a natural way. Before reading the poem, we might have

students brainstorm or free-associate their own connotations for words like snake,

serpent, and python, and invite them to relate stories of encounters with snakes on

camping trips or growing up in rural areas. Some may think of expressions like snake

in the grass to describe someone who turns on us unexpectedly. We may recall the

folktale of the “bosom serpent” in which a man befriends a snake only to have his

kindness repaid with a poisonous bite. The moral is that we must be careful who we

“pick up” and take to our hearts. But some may connect Lawrence’s presence on a

Mediterranean island with Greek stories that link the python with Apollo and his

oracle at Delphi, endowing the place where the god killed the snake with supernatural

wisdom and power. The python is usually taken to represent an earlier religion

connected with mother earth and supplanted by the male god Apollo. Lawrence

would have known this.

Those of us who were fascinated with snakes as children recall a mixture of fear

and attraction that attaches to no other animal with the same intensity. Lawrence

reflects this ambivalence in his poem. He tells us that “the voice of [his] education”

says to kill the snake. He feels “afraid” of the snake but “honoured” to be sought out by

it. He hints at mythical allusions, the snake disappearing into the underworld to be

crowned as king. The nearness of the volcano and the snake’s withdrawal into the

darkness of the earth remind us of hell and the biblical (or Miltonic) connections of

ELIZABETH BISHOP

The Fish (p. 887)

Elizabeth Bishop is known for her precise observations and evocations of objects in

the world. She begins with something concrete and specific, as she does in “The

Fish,” and lets the imagery carry the meaning. She doesn’t tell us what to think about

it but simply paints the picture for her readers to interpret. For instructors using this

anthology in a writing class, Bishop’s poem provides an opportunity to discuss diction,

syntax, and descriptive techniques. Students may notice that “The Fish” is really a sort

of fish story, a narrative about the one that got away or rather, the one that the narrator

allowed to get away. It has unity, beginning with a straightforward statement of what

We can ask students to look at the poem’s diction, plotting words along a ladder of

abstraction. For example, the word tremendous is fairly abstract and general, because

readers’ images of the fish may range from a foot long to something like the great

white shark of the movie Jaws. When the poet says that the fish’s “brown skin hung in

strips / like ancient wall-paper,” the image is more concrete, and the images that

different readers have will come closer to being the same. Students can also be asked

to find similes and metaphors like the wallpaper and to look for other ways that the

writer provides precise descriptions. When she says that the fish “hung a grunting

weight,” several senses come into play, because we see the fish but also feel the tug of

holding it and hear the sound of grunting—whether from the fish or the fisher is

unclear. Color plays an important role, too, coming together in the penultimate line

with the rainbow. The phonetic qualities of words are important to poetic diction. We

can read closely to find alliteration (“tarnished tinfoil,” for example), assonance (“full-

blown roses” or “green weed” or “frayed and wavering”), or unexpected rhymes and

vocal echoes (like “shallower, and yellowed” or “backed and packed” or the

unexpected couplet of lines 46 and 47, ending with “jaw” and “saw”). Students should

also consider the syntax of the poem. The poet uses straightforward declarative

sentences at first. There’s a breathless quality to the series of short parallel sentences of

lines 5 through 9. But the sentences get longer and more complex as the poem

proceeds and the speaker becomes absorbed in her minute descriptions. She seems

almost to look through a magnifying glass.

even when seen in the imagined internal organs of a fish; she sees beauty with an

artist’s eye. (We might note that Bishop was a painter as well as a writer.) When the

poem’s speaker uses the word victory, she refers to the fish but may also refer to herself.

But rather than the victory of catching the grand old fish that myths are built on, hers

is the victory of epiphany, of being struck by beauty and the will to live epitomized by

the brave old fish. One critic has ironically termed Bishop’s fish an “old man of the

sea,” alluding to Ernest Hemingway’s character who tenaciously holds on to his catch,

another symbol of endurance.

In a sense, the whole poem is about seeing. But the writer begins to make this

explicit when she looks into the eyes of the fish in line 34. His eyes are like “tarnished

tinfoil / seen through the lenses / of old scratched isinglass.” Isinglass was used as a

cheap substitute for window glass before the invention of plastics and is translucent

rather than transparent. One sees through such a glass darkly. Like the other images of

the poem, this one emphasizes age and endurance. The fish does not return her gaze.

But later the speaker says that she “stared and stared.” The rainbow itself has to do

WILLIAM STAFFORD

Traveling through the Dark (p. 890)

William Stafford’s narrative poem, in which a speaker finds a pregnant deer dead be-

side a road, reads more like an objective newspaper account than a poem. This matter-

of-fact voice provides readers with the opportunity to discuss his style and tone and the

distance the poet maintains from his emotionally charged topic.

When students write the obligatory autobiographical narrative essay in our first-

year composition courses, they often have trouble separating themselves from the

powerful feelings evoked by the events they want to write about. We usually advise

them to postpone the telling of their loss of a high-school classmate or another recent

traumatic experience until they have more distance. Their deeply felt emotions often

come across as sentimental clichés. The difference between emotion and

sentimentality is difficult to communicate, especially to young people for whom

trauma and the expression of it seem fresh and original from their short perspective.

The key to distinguishing the two has to do with focus. Sentimentality focuses on the

feeling itself—something along the lines of being in love with love. There is a falsity to

Some poets successfully focus on their own feelings, but most readers today resist

a solipsistic outpouring focusing on the speaker’s emotions. A writer like William

Stafford can offer a useful counteracting example to overly emotive verse. Though

some readers find him cold and unfeeling, he succeeds in making most readers feel

something through his understated recital of this waste of life. He doesn’t weep over

the deer or preach at us: “Look what happens when we build roads through the

wilderness!” He lets his readers come to their own conclusions through the evidence

he presents, and he trusts readers to be perceptive enough to feel the emotions that are

submerged beneath the details of the story.

As a leader of creative writing workshops, Stafford emphasizes the need to

communicate emotion without falling into the trap of sentiment. This is done, he

teaches, by writing not about one’s feeling but about the scene, the time of day, the

sensory images that accompanied the emotion. If these concrete details are connected

with emotion for the writer, they can evoke a similar reaction within the reader. The

effect created is one of immediate shared experience. Having said this, we concede

that many readers feel that Stafford goes too far in the other direction when he seeks to

avoid sentimentality and to show rather than tell. When we assign the

autobiographical essay, we urge students to go beyond narrative and description and to

ponder the significance of the event. But though he does so in a subtle way, Stafford

places his narrative in a philosophical context by letting us see his momentary

“swerving” from the necessary deed.

hitting animals when they travel roads through wildlife habitats, and we have seen the

mangled bodies of raccoons and opossums unable to avoid a collision with

civilization. Although some states have laws against taking roadkill home to eat,

presumably to discourage the deliberate use of an automobile as a weapon, few drivers

would deliberately swerve to hit a large animal like a deer. And if they did so, they

would not leave the carcass behind. This deer’s death is accidental, arbitrary—the

result of the narrow mountain road and the deer occupying the same space in the

wilderness. When the speaker says that “to swerve might make more dead,” it is

unclear whether he means that people would be killed as their automobiles swerved

off the road or that more animals might be killed as the cars swerved to avoid this dead

one. He knows what he must do—sacrifice the individual life within the dead doe to

prevent further accidents—but he cannot do it without pause. The empathy implied

in his swerving touches the reader most, though we may understand that the kindest

act is to proceed as he does.

We might wonder if animals seeing automobiles hurtling down the road interpret

them to be fierce beasts of prey. Stafford personifies the car in “Traveling through the

Dark.” He makes it seem like a large cat at rest after taking its prey, using the verb

purred to describe the sound of its engine. The verbs in this fourth stanza give the

automobile credit for its aimed and lowered parking lights, conveying the impression of

the eyes of a sentient being guiltily avoiding the sight of what one of its kind has done.

CHRISTOPHER GILBERT

On the Way Back Home (p. 891)

A stirring meditation on death and discovery, Christopher Gilbert’s “On the Way Back

Home” offers readers a chance to consider how absence changes the world. Here,

Gilbert takes a relatively ordinary event, finding an animal who had been hit by a pass-

ing car, and makes it almost a sublime experience. Dubbed “a fallen star,” the doe the

narrator describes takes on an otherworldly quality in death, “her otherness a light

JUSTICE FOR WORKERS: POEMS (p. 893)

WILIAM BLAKE

The Chimney Sweeper (p. 893)

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 senti-

mental 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 vulnera-

bility 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

that the speaker adds rings hollow, even though both boys may believe it and use it to

get through their miserable 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

PHILIP LEVINE

What Work Is (p. 894)

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 narrator 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 realize that his work is different from that of

his brother and that his inability to connect must mean that there is something he

does not understand after all.

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, putting 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-

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

DEBORAH GARRISON

Worked Late on a Tuesday Night (p. 896)

Deborah Garrison’s poem ‘‘Worked Late on a Tuesday Night’’ acknowledges the

reality of career women’s lives, but it does not necessarily sympathize. The mood is

fairly grim, as suggested by the reference to ‘‘haggard / beauties,’’ and the remark that

‘‘It’s pathetic.’’ The poem gives no quarter. We are made to feel nearly as miserable as

the poem’s character seems to be. Women ‘‘singing the song of time management / all

day long’’ are painted as, if not sellouts, then at the very least caught up in an

uncompromising corporate machine. These ‘‘Phi Beta Kappa’’ ‘‘schoolgirl[s]’’ have

INJUSTICE FOR COMMUNITIES: STORIES (p. 899)

PHILIP SHULTZ

Greed (p. 899)

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 mentions the word

greed, the narrator seems particularly interested in how some people, the “absent

rich,” seem to have it all. For others, financial security ending in retirement is a myth

that they themselves perpetuate. The narrator’s own father bought into the idea that

The physical spaces of the town are also important to Shultz’s piece. For example,

the speaker observes that the houses he once knew as cottages are now empty

mansions owned by banks and far-away rich people—there is no living happening

there. He contrasts this phenomenon with the hard-working individuals he knows, like

the handyman, Santos. By leaving the term greed out of the poem, Shultz is asking the

readers to start making their own connections to what counts as “greed,” particularly

given the town’s struggle to keep the library open, for example. The poem gets

CHAD ABUSHANAB

Dead Town (p. 901)

Chad Abushanab’s “Dead Town,” published in 2016, chronicles the all-too-familiar

scene of industry collapsing and its effects on small industrial communities. Towns are

typically seen as “dead” when there is no longer capital—and soon to follow, people—

circulating within it. For the town described in Abushanab’s lyrical “Dead Town,” the

lack of industry (the mill) is reflected in the shuttering of stores and services, as well as

the “part-time days” the narrator experiences. Those still living in the town move as

specters, in that they remember how the town used to be, and are like ghosts, seeming-

ly incapable of influencing or acting upon that space any longer. The empty buildings

and the “bleached marquee” remain “unchanged, and no one really seems to mind.”

It is as if the remaining townspeople no longer expect to be able to interact with the

MAURICE MANNING

The Hill People (p. 903)

“The Hill People,” published in 2013, describes the speaker’s “vision” of the ghostlike

hill people of Appalachia coming into town. Written without punctuation until the

very end, Maurice Manning’s poem even reads somewhat like a vision—it appears and

continues on without a distinct narrative or break. The poem circles around and re-

peats words, leaving the reader a little breathless in the overflow of images. One of the

poem’s main emphases is on how the town itself isn’t really a town, but rather “a circle

of nothing surrounding nowhere.” There is “no wind,” “no branch,” “no hope,” and

so on. Manning’s repetition of the word no suggests that even if there are people living

there, it is not actual living. The area has lost both natural features, like the wind, and

HE SAID/SHE SAID: RE-VISIONS OF A POEM (p. 906)

ROBERT BROWNING

My Last Duchess (p. 906)

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 dis-

cussion 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 under-

stand 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 read-

ing confessional poetry or texts inspired by William Wordsworth’s Romantic dictum

that poetry should relate intense emotional experience “recollected in tranquillity.”

When students say that they do not like poetry, this is often the sort of poetry they

Although Browning’s biography does not play a direct part in the interpretation 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.

Students usually enjoy researching the romance between the Brownings. When

he was thirty-four, Robert rescued Elizabeth, six years older, from life as an invalid

hovered over by a domineering father. Students who have read Charlotte Perkins

Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” (p. 247) will recognize the sort of inactivity

imposed on Elizabeth Barrett before her marriage to Robert Browning, which was

followed by a fifteen-year residence in Italy and the birth of their son. All evidence

indicates that they were an extremely happy couple from the early days of their

Some scholars have pointed out that the dramatic monologue affords Browning

the safety of speaking indirectly, forcing us to read the implicit meaning 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 interpretations of textbook reading

to explore less obvious issues in literature, “My Last Duchess” serves as a good starting

point. Browning’s complexity of characterization 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 like T. 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

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 marriage. 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 husband 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

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, obviously.

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 controls 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

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

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 portraiture to set the mood.

Reading the poem aloud may give the best grounding 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 are in abusive relationships, punished by husbands or boyfriends for actions

no less innocent than Lucrezia’s seem to be. Browning’s duke is more psychologically

GABRIEL SPERA

My Ex-Husband (p. 909)

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, par-

odies 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 tends to be a poem that is beloved of literature pro-

fessors but leaves non-English majors cold. It is difficult to read well, but it fairly de-

mands to be read aloud to capture the ironic tone, let alone the meaning. Even stu-

dent readers, however, should be able to tackle Gabriel Spera’s poem easily. By pair-

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, because 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

determined 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

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 playwrights 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 stereotype of an angry ball-buster rather than capturing a wife’s deeper feelings?

sympathizing with Spera’s wronged woman while being horrified by Browning’s

reptilian nobleman. Very few readers sympathize with the duke. Discussing our

warrants for this first reaction should prove fruitful. Why do we immediately identify

the young duchess as an innocent victim of a jealous man while we are certain that the

ex-husband has cheated? What does this say about our cultural assumptions about

RACIAL INJUSTICE: POEMS (p. 913)

COUNTEE CULLEN

Incident (p. 913)

Countee Cullen’s poem from 1925 can be placed in the context of a long tradition of

racial incidents involving public transportation. Asian, Irish, and African workers were

exploited, in virtual and sometimes actual slavery, in the 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 nar-

ratives 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

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 punishing her child for

touching a white child might have extrapolated from this and other representative

experiences that black women are violent toward their children had she not been

provided with an explanation that took into account the reality of the woman’s

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 prejudice 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 culture 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. Because 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.

NATASHA TRETHEWEY

Incident (p. 914)

Natasha Trethewey’s poem is surely autobiographical, dealing with the persecution

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 the U.S. Su-

preme Court overturned Virginia’s ban on them. This case was ironically called Lov-

ing 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 history 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 ambitious 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