An’ den de folks, dey natchally bowed dey heads an’ cried, Bowed dey heavy heads, shet dey moufs up tight an’ cried,
There's pain and sadness here like in the Hughes poem "Weary Blues" though I imagine these folks crying would be the listeners to the blues singer in "Weary Blues" like they cry with/for Ma Rainey.
Folks from anyplace Miles aroun’, From Cape Girardeau, Poplar Bluff, Flocks in to hear Ma do her stuff;
Reminds me how Hughes brought up in his essay that the low-down folk would watch Bessie Smith like these folk flock to watch Ma Rainey sing the blues.
Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing voice of Bessie Smith singing the Blues penetrate the closed ears of the colored near intellectuals until they listen and perhaps understand.
Makes me think that Hughes believes in direct action. But like he says a little later in the paragraph he just wants others to understand they are beautiful and they can be ugly too and they themselves know it. That makes me think of jazz.
But jazz to me is one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America; the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul–the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile.
Hughes’ saying jazz is one of the most important forms/expressions of art for black people in his time is reassuring and also reinforces the belief that they invented one of the greatest art forms that everyone has somehow adapted to and should they be “allowed” to? I do know there was a mixing of white and black people playing jazz music at the time so there are branches of it... but Hughes’s line about smiling through the pain and laughter is what evoked these questions.
Let’s be dull like the Nordics,” they say, in effect.
I wonder if this is sarcasm because it made me laugh.
Sweat is dry
weird, but he's probably saying everything has become so dry he can't even sweat anymore.
Old man with wrinkled female breasts
in-between-ness regarding gender
Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.
lidless eyes are disturbing to picture... they'd be unblinking or they would try to blink but get no moisture. Maybe zombies don't blink or don't have use for eyelids (also if you tried to sleep that wouldn't work too well). He's a zombie who does not rest waiting for someone or something to come to him.
Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow
A contradiction, winter being warm, unless Eliot means that by covering up because of winter it's warm. The snow covering Earth... sounds like he enjoys that or finds relief in it. The blankness/blanketing of the snow is like a cleaner slate (or a lie) to him than spring's renewal is, he wants it all covered and forgotten rather than to really face reality.
Unreal City
Interesting choice of word to describe the city, but it's so good to say out loud and as a start to the stanza. The fog and the crowd must add to the unreal feeling he himself has. I'm not sure, but he's probably projecting that unreal-ness because it's what's in him.
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden, Your arms full, and your hair wet,
The hyacinths must be an important detail for it to be so repeated. The hyacinths and the girl holding them. Why did she carry so many? What did she need them for? This seems to be a memory he has of her. If her hair was wet maybe it was raining or she had showered and it hadn't dried. Either way I don't know if she was happy, it's described as though it's a happy scene, but he obviously is not happy.
Pale.
Neatness
Rose
the plums that were in the icebox
School Physician
drive the car
young slatterns
Die early and avoid the fate. Or if predestined to die late, Make up your mind to die in state.
This stanza seems to be saying 'you're going to die like this or like that, but you will die' and it's harsh but Frost is being factually sincere. When he says "make up your mind" it's like he's saying choose how you want to die except that you can't (mostly) so the "state" part might mean choose not to die having gone insane.
I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.
I wonder if the 'difference' is good or bad every time I read these lines over. There's not much that suggests which it could be but the one less traveled by is probably more lonely unless that's what he's into.
The gaps I mean, No one has seen them made or heard them made, But at spring mending-time we find them there,
It's interesting that the gaps in the wall/ seem to be made on their own or by nature because it's unnatural to fence off land in this way. It's also a laborious task seeing as they have to mend it every spring, working hard and going against the earth's will.
Shouting to the wooded hills, singing to the green valleys.
Mrs. Matlock shouted to hills when she was perhaps feeling down, sang to valleys when she was feeling good, ups and downs of life, nothing's perfect etc. There's a semblance of satisfaction/happiness throughout and the "shouting" could have double meaning but I'm choosing to believe it's the one slip up that shows she was angry and frustrated sometimes because come on now...
Blind to all of it all my life long.
The narrator never paid attention to the beauty and terror around them, in nature, people, everything. Wonder how old this person is?
Below him, in the town among the trees, Where friends of other days had honored him, A phantom salutation of the dead Rang thinly till old Eben’s eyes were dim.
Seems like the people he knew in the town who were his friends have all died. Since he's going up a hill somewhere he probably left the town because everything changed when everyone died making it painful to stay there . He's close to death too by the looks of it. The "honored" part makes me wonder if he was someone of importance in Tilbury Town at one time.
I always lock the door when I creep by daylight.
Before this she said she sleeps during the daytime because she doesn't at night and now it's hard to believe she may even sleep at all. Also there's the use of the word creep and earlier she said the woman in the wall would "crawl" as well. It's pretty disturbing to visualize this especially when the word is so recurring. I'm wondering why the word creep was used instead of walk or wander or something. Is it because she's forbidden to do it and her escaping calls for use of word creep as a form of sneaking around? When she sees the woman outside her window (creeping) is she seeing herself? The way Du Bois saw through the way others would see him and make him objective through their eyes, Gilman's narrator is seeing this woman (herself) from outside of herself as a way to break away from that (the way her husband sees her). The end result is terrifying, but it shows her what's real.
I used to lie awake as a child and get more entertainment and terror out of blank walls and plain furniture than most children could find in a toy store.
I find her relationship with furniture and walls relatable. I never really thought about how common it could be to find scary and/or peaceful shapes and figures on the ceiling or to have favorite pieces of furniture. This almost makes it feel like it could incriminate her, like "oh yeah she used to see things in walls and gave personalities to chairs no wonder she went off the deep end with the wallpaper." But really it was probably the way she had no control this time, not even as a child but as an adult to do things her way that all she had was that wallpaper to figure out on her own.
It was nursery first and then playroom and gymnasium, I should judge; for the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls.
The fact that her husband put her in a room with barred windows, a room that was for children, just says that this man is treating his wife as if she was a child and not equal to him, mental illness aside. She tells him she wants the room downstairs with the flowers and she gets shut down for almost everything she asks him. This leads to the obsession with the yellow wallpaper and it's interesting that she ends up seeing bars in the wallpaper and then a woman behind those bars. It's like a reflection of herself, a way to force her to see what her reality is beneath the appearance, what Adams argued in regards to his own male life and existential drama.
this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity
This reminds me of the way Adams watches others reactions by the way they see things i.e. his mentor looking at the cathedral. Looking at things through the eyes of others except that from DuBois’ experience it’s seeing the way people look at him, it’s personal. In this instance he’s the cathedral and the one watching others study him.
exercising vastly more attraction over the human mind than all the steam-engines and dynamos ever dreamed of; and yet this energy was unknown to the American mind.
He keeps going on about how Americans suck when it comes to things like art when it's what people truly have a connection with (more than dynamos although that's what they seem to focus on most), a comparison of Americans to other parts of the world like Chartres and Louvre.
No American had ever been truly afraid of either.
Here I wonder if he's saying Americans had never been afraid of either Venus or the Virgin, or of Venus and Virgin or the X-rays and hinting that perhaps they should be afraid.
The rays that Langley disowned, as well as those which he fathered, were occult, supersensual, irrational; they were a revelation of mysterious energy like that of the Cross;
sounds like Adams is saying that discoveries in science/technology, using Langley's "rays" as an example, are as unfathomable as religion
They feed they Lion and he comes.
Wondering who "he" is because I didn't think of this as a religious poem then this threw me for a loop. The "he" isn't capitalized so it might not be God Levine is referring to. So then who is he? Now that I brought capitalization into the mix I'm realizing that "Lion" has been capitalized throughout so the Lion is referring to something more than just an animal, maybe a collective resolve.
Out of the bones’ need to sharpen and the muscles’ to stretch, They Lion grow.
At first I read the "need" here differently, but it ends up being that the bones are in need (personification?) instead of just needing the bones to "sharpen," if that makes sense to anyone else but me. The use of sharpening sounds threatening, like there's a preparation for something big that's to come where they will be needed. Sharp bones and stretched muscles is pretty gruesome to picture, but here it's necessary for the lion to continue to grow.