Don’t knock at my heart, little one, I cannot bear the pain Of turning deaf-ear to your call Time and time again! You do not know the monster men Inhabiting the earth, Be still, be still, my precious child, I must not give you birth!
This is such a beautiful poem, and brought tears to my eyes. This reminds me of Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, because Sethe is a mother who protects her child by taking her out of the world... She would not stand for the abuse and mistreatment of her children. She rather kill her baby with Love, than it die by hate.



While the poem speaks of oppression and essentially slavery in so many words, it also ends with a very optimistic outlook. Even though ethnicity separates our speaker from the white household, there is a feeling of hope or confidence in the possibility of change. Tomorrow is future tense showing the poets hopefulness in eventual revolution. "From Slavery Through Reconstruction" reminds me of this process society must go through in order to achieve equality. In the painting a man points to the horizon which is lit bright representing the faith he has in the future. The light acts as a symbol of the united society he yearns for.
The title of this piece reminds me of the painting by Kenneth Hayes Miller, "The Waste". It has the same idea of a Waste Land as we talked about in class; desolate, lonely, dreary, etc. It seems that both of these pieces play with the idea of a Waste Land in different ways; the painting being more literal. 
This reminds me of John Sloan's Night Windows as it makes me think of endless toil and hard labour. The artwork has a similar feeling as it depicts people living in places of hardship and surrounded by the black fog of a city as if they cannot escape from toil.



This bit of the Wasteland reminds me of this painting from the Armory show of 1913. The speaker here sits upon the shore fishing as there are arid lands behind them and this is very apparent in the photo as you can see water in the very back of the painting. Its as if the speaker of the Wasteland is one of the people present within the painting following up to their word and getting their lands in order as well.