roaring over the roof they’ve come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself
This line gives different meaning to the times that angel were mentioned before. “Angel” has been used in good and bad contexts within the poem, but the narrator often described them using words like burning, illuminated, and blond. If the angel here is a bomb, the burning yellow illumination means an entirely different thing
What sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Capitalism and industrialization here is has killed imagination and thought. The “who” in the first part of the poem has had their imagination crushed by aluminum and concrete. This also goes back to the line where the narrator said “and who were given instead that concrete void.”
and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination
This reminds me of Eliot’s “April is the cruelest month.” Hope here is a hallucination just as much as it is for those living in the wasteland.
Keep us strong. . . .
This connects nicely to the next poem "Strong Men". While physical strength can be improved, music and people like Ma provides strength for the mind and spirit. There's resilience in music and things like "signal songs" are examples of that
An’ some folks sits dere waitin’ wid deir aches an’ miseries, Till Ma comes out before dem, a-smilin’ gold-toofed smiles
This speaks to the power of music. People who are suffering, with miseries, aches, and pains are able to find some joy in Ma's performances
Thundered an’ lightened an’ the storm begin to roll Thousan’s of people ain’t got no place to go.
This line in Ma's song provides some social commentary on how black, impoverished people in the South are disproportionately affected by severe weather/hurricanes/floods. Ma's story about losing her home is one that a lot of people in the area could probably relate to
“The Weary Blues” (1923)
This is one of Hughes’ “jazz poems” that we read about last week. It’s not only about the blues, but it should be read in a musical/rhythmic way as well. I found a musical/spoken rendition of it here
Nobody’ll dare Say to me, “Eat in the kitchen,” Then
This was written long before the end of segregation laws in the US. These lines emphatically assert that there will be a future where black people have a seat at the table (so to speak). It’s so interesting to see how much of Hughes’ hopes came true. While there has been a lot of progress since 1926, ultimately we are still living in a racist country.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I think this line speaks to some of the generational knowledge and culture that the speaker was describing a few lines up. When thinking about where they came from, the speaker feels as though they know themselves and their history. Perhaps this process of thinking about the past has caused the speaker to grow weary. They feel like an old soul, similar to the “Ancient, dusky rivers”
He is never taught to see that beauty. He is taught rather not to see it, or if he does, to be ashamed of it when it is not according to Caucasian patterns.
This goes back to the themes of division and alienation that we have been talking about in class. There is a pressure/socialization that forces African Americans to view themselves, and others, through a lens of whiteness. This is an inherently alienating process, as forced assimilation and Americanization removes the connection you once had to your own culture. It is reminiscent of what DuBois said 23 years before this was published. When discussing the internal division one feels, DuBois said, "One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder."
What makes you do so many jazz poems?
Hughes coined the term jazz poems to describe his prose, which closely resembled the lyrical and rhythmic feel of jazz music. Here are some Hughes jazz/blues poems
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46548/harlem https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47347/the-weary-blues https://poets.org/poem/harlem-night-club
Father is often dark but he has usually married the lightest woman he could find
It's interesting here that Hughes addresses misogynoir and colorism. Lighter-skinned black women are still more socially accepted, within the media in particular, than dark-skinned black women. There's an intersection here between colorism, racism, and classism, where darker skinned women are viewed as less beautiful and lower class. Below is a study about the mental and social effects of colorism on black women
https://www.jstor.org/stable/26505337?seq=3#metadata_info_tab_contents
Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoYrRZ97QCg
The lyrics to this lovely Hank Williams song are very reminiscent of this Eliot poem to me. The song itself sounds like it could play in a sort of wasteland, with Williams' melancholic singing and the fact that it hasn't been remastered. Also, for any The Last of Us (really great zombie game, which wouldn't exist with the Eliot poem) fans, this song plays in the HBO trailer and is referenced in the game itself. So it does play in that version of a wasteland.
The beginning of the Williams song describes a time before the wasteland (in his case, the wasteland is caused by a lost love). He says, "We met in the springtime when blossoms unfold / The pastures were green and the meadows were gold." Eliot never describes this time, but we understand that there was a time before, because people reminisce about it in the same way that Williams is. After Williams loses his love, and starts to enter his version of the wasteland, the song and poem become much more similar. Williams sings, "The roses have faded, there's frost at my door / The birds in the morning don't sing anymore." Either fall or winter is coming for Williams, but this line also marks where the wasteland begins to take hold. I imagine this part of the song as the unwritten part of Eliot's poem, the beginning of the end. Williams goes on, "The grass in the valley is starting to die / And out in the darkness the whippoorwills cry." The wasteland here, like the Eliot poem, is also missing plant life. A bird song would usual signify some kind of life, but in American folklore, a whippoorwill call means impending death. Had Eliot chosen to explain how we got to the wasteland, I imagine his prose would be quite similar to Williams'. The Williams poem, to me, fills in the blanks and recontextualizes some of the Eliot poem.
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jYX5aZIqBc
"The Grass is No Green" from the amazing Aphrodite's Child album End of the World. This whole album evokes imagery of a wasteland, but this song in particular feels very wasteland. The song title itself, "The Grass is No Green," evokes the same imagery as Eliot does with the wasteland. Eliot's wasteland can't grow very many plants, which means people have to eat dried tubers. The little plants they do get, like the lilacs, remind the people of a time they can never go back to. The land is dead and the grass is no green.
The opening lyrics establish a similar feeling. The singer says, "The land is starving / it needs watering." Wastelands are often depicted as having either too much or too little water. Eliot seems to imagine the latter, as the narrator says "summer surprised us...with a shower of rain." Summer rain being very common in a normal pre-wasteland climate, these lines signify that this wasteland likely doesn't receive much rain. The singer continues, saying "The birds on the trees / Won't open the spring / For the rain won't fall here / And the grass is no green." Spring in this wasteland, like in Eliot's, does not bring new life like it once did. Instead, spring represents the unchanging elements of the wasteland. The birds don't return and the rain doesn't fall. If they did see some elements of new life, it would likely give people false hope, just as it does in Eliot's poem.
April is the cruellest month
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NWjRmfnmIk
Great song about the passage of time pre-wasteland. The lyrics contrast the way that Eliot depicts the change of seasons in this poem. This song presents a more traditional view of the seasons and of change. Spring brings life and new love for the narrator: "April, come she will / When streams are ripe and swelled with rain." The arrival of fall signifies a death. They say. "August, die she must / The autumn winds blow chilly and cold." In September, "a love once new has now grown old." Fall marks the death and aging of the spring love they once had, in the same way that fall marks the death and aging of plants as they prepare for winter. In contrast, the depiction of spring in Eliot's poem is a twisted one; the wasteland has turned people's lives upside down, and because of that, people don't view the seasons in the same way. Spring is the cruelest month, as it reminds people of how the world once was. Where fall brings death in the Simon & Garfunkel song, fall and winter provide security for those living in the wasteland.
“That corpse you planted last year in your garden, “Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
This reminds me of Phoebe Bridgers' "Garden Song", because she plants a garden over a dead body. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1LqnTuQNHc
"And when your skinhead neighbor goes missing / I'll plant a garden in the yard then / They're gluing roses on a flatbed / You should see it, I mean thousands"
Cow come out cow come out and out and smell a little. Draw prettily. Next to a bloom. Neat stretch. Place plenty. Cauliflower.
I love the story presented in these lines. Although Stein is talking about a cousin, she interjects that story with a folksy tale about a cow. The cow comes out of the barn, smells a flowers, and then stretches and lays down
Cunning is and does cunning is and does the most beautiful notes.
Theres a contrast between “humming” and “cunning” here, although it’s presented in fragments. It’s interesting that “cunning” produces beautiful notes, when it doesn’t produce real notes at all, unlike “humming”
Ease all I can do.
This a fragmented way to finish the line “humming is.” Humming is easy, and it’s all she can do in this moment
the Wheel
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
This is a picture of the London Bridge in the 1920s. You can see both the fog and crowd, so it matches what Eliot describes
Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden
A hyacinth garden tucked along a path by an old home. I chose this image because I feel like the house matches the tone of the story
reared by the state
The girl, Elsie, as being a product of a marriage with "Indian blood" is being taken from her home by the state. Although she is placed in a random home to work, Native children were often removed from their homes and families to be sent to "boarding schools", meant to forcibly assimilate them into WASPy American culture. This practice was common place in America until the mid 1930s, but some boarding schools remained open longer.
http://www.nativepartnership.org/site/PageServer?pagename=airc_hist_boardingschools
Somehow it seems to destroy us
Imagining the deer in the field destroys people. The longing for something hopeful and natural, yet fleeting, ultimately leaves people with despair
The pure products of America go crazy—
The "pure products" here are Americans themselves: mountain folk, deaf-mutes, thieves, devil-may-care men, and young slatterns. They are going crazy because they are "degraded prisoners"
A rusted iron column whose tall core The rains have tunnelled like an aspen tree.
There's commentary about industrialization here, which is brought up again a few lines down: "that heaven itself in arms could not persuade / to lay aside the lever and the spade"
In that the foul supplants the fair
I love the juxtaposition between foul and fair here. It brings the comparison of a pretty yet poisonous flower or a rose with thorns full circle. there is something coarse, dangerous, or brutal even within beauty.
Yet many a man is making friends with death Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
A man is dying unloved, is he lonely and on his death bed? Death by a broken heart? Maybe he's depressed because of a love gone wrong?
The witch that came (the withered hag) To wash the steps with pail and rag, Was once the beauty Abishag,
To me this contrasts Robinson’s “The Dead Village”. This woman, once beautiful, was now a “withered hag”. Time comes for us all—“now there is nothing but the ghost of things”
Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it Where there are cows? But here there are no cows. Before I built a wall I’d ask to know What I was walling in or walling out,
Frost is asking, why do you want to be kept in? Is this neighbor self-isolating? Frost perceives the neighbor’s wall as a means of confinement, like how we lock away cattle, but the neighbor doesn’t seem to view it like that
Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though; He will not see me stopping here
Just like Robinson, Frost here is using a village as a motif, although this feels more isolated than what Robinson describes
And there was nothing in the town below
This author has a thing for abandoned towns and villages. I think an empty town is a good way to depict loneliness, isolation, and the changes that come with the passage of time
Here there is death
Literal death or is the village just abandoned? The narrator doesn't reveal why the village is so empty. Was there a plague? Mass migration? Pillage/murder?
Now there is nothing but the ghosts of things
Interesting that he gives non-living things "ghosts". The ghost of unrememberable light and the ghost of the music that used to play. Inanimate things have spirits here
I am out of your way now, Spoon River,
This line implies that the narrator thinks that he and his library were the things that prevented Spoon River from being amoral. Now that he has passed, there's nothing stopping the town from "choosing their own good"
What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness, Anger, discontent and drooping hopes?
I love that the narrator feels this content on her deathbed. At 96, she lived a simple yet fulfilling life. She doesn't want people around her to feel sorrow after her death because she hasn't lived her life with regrets
Blind to all of it all my life long.
Blind to the beauty of life while alive, but the narrator can see the beauty in death
You see he does not believe I am sick!
She is likely experiencing depression or some other mental illness, but in this day and age she would be given the diagnosis of "female hysteria". Her remedy is to stay in a summer home, as a prisoner, but her Dr husband or brother could've given her shock treatment or some drugs like morphine and opium back in this time period
It only interests me, but I feel sure John and Jennie are secretly affected by it.
Her cognitive dissonance here is really interesting. After hearing all about how the wallpaper affects her, she not says "it only interests me..."
for the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls.
The fact that her husband puts her in a room with barred windows shows what he thinks of her. She is a prisoner here, not really a wife or equal partner
Are they all wrong,—all false? No, not that, but each alone was over-simple and incomplete,—the dreams of a credulous race-childhood, or the fond imaginings of the other world which does not know and does not want to know our power. To be really true, all these ideals must be melted and welded into one.
This call to action is a powerful one. Learning from the mistakes and shortcomings of former movements to create a strong push for true freedom and equality. After this was written Dubois continued writing and organizing, going on to co-create the NAACP
To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships
Speaking to the importance of discussing both race and class, as they work in tandem to keep oppressed people oppressed
The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land
After the failures of Reconstruction, it is no wonder that Dubois believes America is not yet a free country, for him and all other African Americans. It’s unfortunate to think that today—100+ years after this was written—America is still “yet to find peace from its sins”
Forty-five years of study had proved to be quite futile for the pursuit of power
He studied for all these years but still doesn't feel fulfilled or at peace with what he has learned. The more he learns the less he knows
Langley, with the ease of a great master of experiment, threw out of the field every exhibit that did not reveal a new application of force, and naturally threw out, to begin with, almost the whole art exhibit. Equally, he ignored almost the whole industrial exhibit.
Langley seems to be obsessed with innovation and modernity, but cannot apply theories of the past to the present. He doesn't care about art, history, or political theory, only innovations in industry
Not until they found themselves actually studying the sculpture of the western portal, did it dawn on Adams’s mind that, for his purposes, St. Gaudens on that spot had more interest to him than the cathedral itself. Great men before great monuments express great truths, provided they are not taken too solemnly.
Clearly Gaudens has more to offer Adams as a teacher than Langley did. What is Gaudens thinking in this situation? What insight can he provide Adams, that he cannot think of himself?
oil-stained earth
Our Earth is oil-stained and burning. Earlier he described Earth as a mother of sorts, after mentioning the hardening of mothers. It seems like industrial efforts on Earth (building, burning, manufacturing, cars, etc) are hardening/changing/aging the planet
creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies
Creosote is a biproduct created by wood-burning, not as commonly used in houses after we moved to electricity+gas. We go from the past (creosote) to the modern (gasoline). Same with the drive shafts and wooden dollies, but in the reverse. Drive shafts are on cars and moving machinery, whereas a wooden dollie is just wood and wheels. The present versus the past
sack
Reiterating the imagery of the "burlap sack" from the beginning of the poem. He also brings up oil again, in the next line. By reusing the same imagery the poem feels almost circular--we have gone back the beginning of the poem while reading the end.