Zombie motif: Phlebas still personified even in death, not just a body but "he" who can "forget" as if he's still experiencing something of the world buried at sea. Not rats this time but the sea picking his bones feel similar, like the rats or sea swell interacting with the bones, moving them around to give them motion and feigned agency, or maybe more along the lines of illustrating how exposed the inner structure becomes after death, at the mercy of the ocean or creatures passing by

bone/rat connection again

Zombie motif: are these the bones the men from my previous annotation lost? Before it was men without bones, now it's bones in motion, reanimated with character and personality (a chuckle). Also line beneath this mentions a rat while the previous line with bones followed a line about "rats' ally"- possible rat/bones connection?

Zombie motif: dead men (men not bodies, retaining gender and personhood after death) being personified as if even after death they can possess and lose things. What does it mean to lose one's bones? After mind and life, and now physical structure of the body is gone, how can they still be men?

what does having a cold have to do with being clairvoyante?

if winter "kept us warm" then why does he need to go south in the winter?

It seems like the poem is going to follow a pattern, explaining April (spring?), winter, and summer, but here it doesn't continue with the pattern and feels like it goes off on a separate tangent? How is this related? Why switch into German?

Interesting how he admits knowledge of the plums' importance to whoever this is addressed. When people apologize there's often an excuse attached, like "I didn't know they were yours" or "I didn't know you were saving them," so they can maintain a good image, but the author doesn't pretend or try to weasel his way out of responsibility. Its a completely honest "I did something that negatively affects you (something socially immoral), I knew it would (knew it was immoral), and I did it anyways. Also I enjoyed it." This theme also makes me think of Beat poetry, even though the form or imagery doesn't feel similar, because it's like yeah sometimes we do things society would disapprove of and we like it and are going to celebrate it and make art out of it, deal with it.

it's all third person above but narrator switches to first person here to include himself in the poem, then continuing to define "us" as "degraded prisoners" who "eat filth" and are somehow destroyed by "the stifling heat of September." I wonder what separates "us" from the doctor's families/Elsies- class? Upbringing? Religious morality (wondering if Elsie was chosen to represent those "pledged to God" like the name means)?

This feels very reminiscent of Beat Generation imagery to me, I honestly didn't know that the railroading lifestyle was talked about in this way so early in the 1900s, although if there were railroads I guess there had to be a type of lifestyle associated with them... wonder if/how this influenced the Beat poets later on, especially with the very fragmented and Howl-like form and imagery

This reminds me of the line in They Feed They Lion, "Mothers hardening like pounded stumps." All will be easier, but will the mind be hindered in it's iron cortex? Will it be more like a stump? Or is this poem questioning that notion, that hardening does away with fairness? Maybe the defense protects but does not diminish: the rose is more refined in contrast to its thorns, the delphinium more mysteriously delicate because of its poison, the mothers emitting more of Venus in their hardening...

I'm not really sure what to make of this poem but it feels very spiritual to me. The Man who here lies doesn't have any personal details said about his life or what he accomplished or brought into the world, but even without those he still wore pride and had a prime and was all the clamour. Just by being alive there were attributes he acquired, even if they are vague. This last line, "I know" makes me think of the idea of a god and how most religions teach that they know you even if others do not (don't worry what other's think because God knows your soul type of thing). Maybe the narrator is God looking down and acknowledging his life and humanity with some insider knowledge. Maybe narrator is just a human doing the same, recognizing humanity in another who is nameless, which feels pretty holy in itself anyways.

Love is not all, is not equal to all, it cannot be substituted for food or shelter or medical help, but "many a man" and the narrator seem to value it more than anything else. If he wouldn't trade love/the memory of it for food, I assume even in desperation, then he values it above his life, as do men who make "friends with death" because they have none. It's the difference between what allows you to keep living and what makes life worth keeping living. A man who has love wants for that love to continue and for food/sustenance, but a man without love doesn't want for food- what is there to sustain?

it seems like the "that" which doesn't like the wall is set up to be mysterious and something of a creature since it's not personified, but now the poem turns and seems to imply that the "that" actually might be a person, his neighbor, and instead of a creepy vibe it takes on more of a humanizing sympathetic feeling, like aw he says it's good to have a wall but maybe he likes it to come down a bit so they can put it back up together?

Just the phrasing of this line is unexpected. Why isn't is "there is something that doesn't love a wall"? What is "that" and why is the subject so vague from the beginning? Did he write it this way to defamiliarize the language and make us think more, or is it phrased that way to give it a specific meaning?

He sets up the paths as very similar, emphasizing that there's not much difference between them where they diverge, and there's not much to consider when picking one. He can't see the outcome, and it doesn't seem like it'll really matter, but then he ends the poem by telling us that his choice, as small and insignificant as it was, changed everything anyways

Like Du Bois had knowledge of black culture/art/literature/experience that he was trying to translate to the white academics who couldn't understand, the narrator here tried to share his perspective in knowing the range of good and evil in the world that the townspeople cannot understand- not because the topics are too hard to grasp, but because they never read from the library, never tried.

My understanding of the double consciousnesses so far is that Adams was conscious of an alienated third person character he created, and Du Bois of the false stereotypical character that others perceived him to be, and now Mr. Flood of a close (almost opposite to Adam's distanced character) intimate double of himself with which he can communicate, commiserate, and reflect on his position in the world together with, almost like seeing himself through a friend's eyes except that his friends are long gone.

This reminds me a bit of the veil Du Bois talks about. There's a brotherhood about the clerks now that binds them and in doing so separates them from the young and the rest. They're still "just as human," but the ancient air they wear makes their souls harder to see than when "blood was in their cheeks" and "women called them fair." The author has to remind us that they were just as good, it's not a given that we as readers assume that.

I was surprised that she ended up being the one to restrain herself in the room. I expected her mental state to deteriorate enough that John would lock the gate at the stairs or chain her to the walls or something obvious, but I didn't think that she would be the one to tie herself to the rope and lock the door. It makes sense, though, that if the imprisonment she suffered was mental (gaslighting and confusing her into staying rather than actually chaining her up), then her escape would have to also be in her mind rather than the reality, like by the end she had gone so far into herself that to be free was to creep openly/act however she had an impulse to rather than to be free of the actual room.

This confused me while reading this because while John denies that she's sick, he also makes decisions about what she should or should not do based on her needing to get better (implying she is sick). It's like he keeps her "illness" as this vague, shifty concept that he can use to control her by either verifying or denying it's existence based on the situation. He takes her ability to choose in matters of sleep and eating, but then also has to deny her a reason/diagnosis or any understanding of her own medical/mental state because she can't argue or disagree if she doesn't understand.

Everything else is kept from her- her writing, hobbies, socializing, her baby, her own mind- so her knowledge of and relationship to the wallpaper becomes her only true possession. Whether she likes it or not, she has to keep looking at it, keep obsessing over it, because it's the last thing she has that no one will take from her and that she feels sure of. Makes me think of how people who are depressed or in pain will refuse help despite their suffering because it's THEIR depression or pain; even if things are getting worse, they feel in control of the deterioration as opposed to the unknown of what harm (or help) another individual might do to them (like John confusing or denying her further).

This piece is different from Adam's in that Du Bois uses first person and places himself into the narrative

This reminds me of the way Adams talked about the Virgin or Venus- their powers of force from the past are lost on Americans because they don't "know the formula" (can't conceptualize or don't know to look for the inherent strength they have just by existing, can't see the value of female sexuality or blackness)

While Henry Adams chose to focus on the consciousness of a subject as an intellectual experiment, Du Bois was forced to view himself through a similar lens

Is force in this chapter inherently feminine (at least regarding human symbols), defined by it's fecundity and capability to physically reproduce? If the idea of the horse fails to add equivalent force to General Sherman, what qualities in a male figure, if any, would produce such force? Does the dynamo have a sex and what is it?

What is meant by "the new rays" and "his own rays"? Is the word "rays" being used as a metaphor for generators of energy like the dynamos/steam engines/electrical currents/whatever Langley made? If so does this mean that Langley sees his own scientific creations as somehow purer, and why? Did they harness the "natural" power of the sun's rays maybe? What in particular makes these new creations more wicked than his (was it the fuel? the byproducts? did they threaten to replace previous inventions? something else?) Also what is meant by doubling the solar spectrum- did he double what we could observe of it? What could be harnessed or utilized in energy production?

At first I read this thinking it referred to Newton's laws about forces, and was confused because it made more sense to me that science was the 'study' of forces rather than the 'development' or 'economy' of them (observation rather than production?). But after looking up Newton I realized he wasn't even born yet, so maybe it's talking about social forces? Something else? And what is meant by "true science" (what other sciences were around at the time, what made one of them more or less true than the others, how is true defined in this sentence). --possibly some of these questions would be cleared up if I remembered reading anything by Bacon...

Really like this line. To me it emphasizes how holiness is not something stumbled upon, or something one is gently drawn to. There's a ferocity in the need to be holy, to be driven towards any experience that's opposite that of being a pig stuck in the mud or something

makes me think of transgenerational trauma, women being compressed and stunted by their mothers because the same was done to them, hardening to survive, passing that on... "hurt people hurt people" and such

interesting that "buried aunties" gets listed along "industrial barns" or "rain"; the first two are pretty common & remind me of the color grey or feeling of melancholy, but in a benign everyday kind of way, whereas "buried aunties" feels more emotionally potent