Her teeth are tolerable
During the 1770's dentistry was becoming a popular subject and profession. The higher the class the more access to sweets that could cause cavities and decay in teeth. However, these classes also had access to tooth powders and picks (Jane Austen's England: Daily Life in Georgian and Regency Periods).
— — shire
"This is standard eighteenth- and nineteenth-century practice to create a sense of realism: the author leaves out the name of the country or person, thus pretending it is a real one and that he or she does not wish to intrude upon the privacy of real people" (The Victorian Web).
employment
"The action or fact of using something for a purpose; utilization, application, use. Also: an instance of this" (OED).
Spanish chesnuts
"The European or Spanish Chestnut actually originated in Asia Minor. It is believed that the ancient Greeks were the first to introduce and cultivate chestnuts in the Mediterranean region about 3.000 years ago. The Romans were later responsible for extending the cultivation into northwest and central Europe" (The World of Chestnuts - Culinary Collective).
Hertfordshire
Map of Hertfordshire, 1787.
When Ma Rainey Comes to town, Folks from anyplace Miles aroun’,
This quote shows the migration and movement of the people. Also, this poem, and the other Brown poems, root the spelling and sound of the words in the accent of a lower class individual. Like Hughes suggests, Brown is celebrating the lower class Negro by including the sound of the language. Brown is not trying to speak to the upper/middle class.
Me an’ muh baby gonna shine, shine Me an’ muh baby gonna shine. The strong men keep a-comin’ on The strong men git stronger. . . .
This quote sounds like the songs/hymns of the slaves and Negro churches. It has a call and return feel. It also shows the attitude of positivity, and growth of strength slowly rising up the Racial Mountain to revolution.
They broke you in like oxen, They scourged you, They branded you, They made your women breeders, They swelled your numbers with bastards. . . . They taught you the religion they disgraced.
This is so chilling! It really emphasizes the way slaveowners dehumanized their slaves. It hits it right on the head. Also, in regards to Hughes, it points out what the White class did to the Negro class, why would the Negro class want to imitate the White class?
the low-down folks, the so-called common element,
This feels like the opposite of the Duke Ellington piece we watched in class. The D.E. piece looked very "white" in comparison to the reality of a "truly great Negro artist" Hughes is presenting in this paragraph. The D.E. seems to be more for the middle class Negro Hughes describes above. Or at least it seems presented in that way in the film of the ideal A Train.
And they themselves draw a color line.
A new veil is being presented between class. Hughes is pointing out that the middle class Negros are trying to separate themselves from the lower class. Essentially, trying to conform into "white" culture.
“I want to be a poet–not a Negro poet,”
This reminds me of the Johnson's novel "The Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man". The main character is a colored man whose skin is light enough to 'pass' for white. He tends to got back an forth when it suits him, eventually living out the rest of his life as a white man. Through the novel he realizes that he too the easy way out. That it would have been much braver to live has a colored man. The novel also speaks to the 'artist' in him as he is a musician and he deals with being the best "Negro" musician vs. the best musician.
He did a lazy sway . . . He did a lazy sway . . .
this repetition feels like a rhythmic repetition to really emphasize the sway and makes the reader slow down as a blues song is slow.
“Harlem”
This poem confuses me in terms of if it is positive or negative. Maybe that is the point. But it seems that Harlem is the dream deferred. And perhaps it has all the elements in the poem. Maybe it does stink, it is sweet, and it has exploded (in popularity).
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
This poem has many elements of modernism. It mentions many geographical places. This poem does not seem to have a set location. And possibly because it is searching for home? Also in the last line, if we go back to thinking of water and wet as a sign of life. this last line could read "My soul has grown" full of life. Even though he has migrated (intentionally and forced) he is still full of life
Arrange.
This poem feels like this word. I feel like she is arranging and rearranging words, sentences, and meanings, in order to get different words, sentences, and meanings. It's like arranging a room. You never really know if something does or doesn't work until you try.
forgive
This whole sentence is interesting. I don't think it makes sense as one sentence, but it can make sense broken up in different parts. It allows you to play with meaning within a sentence.
patent
This feels like a play on the the words "pat ten" smooshed together = "patent". It feels like she is making a math equation out of words. i dont know
patches of standing water the scattering of tall trees
This fraise reminds me of the seemingly randomness of some of the paintings from the Armory Show. Particularly the words, "patches" and "scattering" shows the randomness of nature.
By constantly tormenting them with reminders of the lice in their children’s hair
An interesting way of looking at the relationship between a physician and a struggling/poor parent. The word "tormenting" is particularly powerful to me. It shows the helplessness of the parents.
that she’ll be rescued by an agent— reared by the state and sent out at fifteen to work in some hard-pressed house in the suburbs—
"rescued by an agent" then "sent out at fifteen to work" doesn't sound like she is being 'rescued' or saved, merely found and put to work. "some-hard pressed house in the suburbs" the lines start to sound like a factory, ends with what we would normally see as the opposite of a factory. This is the defamiliarizing the household. And giving it new meaning or new way of looking at it. A household is also a factory.
some may consider open to debate
scribbling about a new fashion
Here lies, and none to mourn him but the sea
Seems like an unnamed or unmarked grave. Usually it would say "here lies, dearly beloved (name here)". However, the title and the first line robs the dead even of being loved. Only the cold see mourns him.
Unthorned into the tending hand
the stalk is trusting in the "tending hand", unthorned and unarmed.
It well may be. I do not think I would.
Possibly like Frost, the speaker is turns the poem to mean something else in the end? It seems that the speakers starts with saying "Love is not all" and goes into detail of what it is not. Then at the end of the poem comes to the conclusion that the speaker would not trade love for anything. And perhaps love is everything that is needed.
I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Like Edward Lee Master's "Lucinda Matlock" this poem seems to giving an uplifting motivational morale, but really by the speaker's 'sigh' it seems that he realizes his lie before he tells it. He knows the roads were the same and perhaps his regret is going back to take the other road in order to see what that road had in store.
And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black.
Both roads are the same. Both have been untraveled. And so the famous last lines are told in the past as a way to make meaning to which road he took, when in actuality both road "equally lay".
We keep the wall between us as we go.
This reminds me of Dubois and the "color-line" issue. Keeping a wall or line to separate from one another. Just like the unasked question.
an ancient air
alliteration, with the "a" sounds requires a slower, harder pace here, just as ancient air is.
He raised up to the light The jug that he had gone so far to fill,
I wonder, are these the bodies of water in the world raising their glasses, or water levels to the Harvest moon? Is this to explain why we have floods using personification vs. science?
Life is too strong for you– It takes life to love Life.
This seems like a poem for a "celebration of life" ceremony. It seems like it is redefining the grieving process. But also pushes a positive spin on life. It tells us to love life, because we have it.
Choose your own good and call it good. For I could never make you see That no one knows what is good Who knows not what is evil;
This feels like the theme of good vs. evil. More importantly the yin and yang of good and evil. For we have "good" in the vocabulary because there is also "evil", and vice versa.
I lie here on this great immovable bed—it is nailed down,
The room is starting to sound less like a nursery and more and more like an asylum.
I must not let her find me writing.
The form in which this is written is very interesting. It is like journal or diary entries that are secret from her family. The choppiness of the writing shows the urgency the narrator feels when writing. It must be kept a secret.
Then he took me in his arms and called me a blessed little goose
It is a consistent theme that the husband and doctor treat the narrator like a child. "blessed little goose" is a term that seems child-like. Even the Wallpaper's appearance reminds her of a nursery.
The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia the Shadowy and of Egypt the Sphinx.
"The shadow", yet again he is referencing a sort of Veil or mystery of the Negro. Hidden behind a screen of obscurity.
He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa.
This reminds me of Phyllis Wheatley's poem "On Being Brought From Africa to America". She states that slavery is horrible thing and she wishes it never happened. But she could never wish that at the same time, because that would me she would never have been brought to America. Double edge sword.
It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, 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. 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.
This important revelation expresses the split feelings of America as a Negro American. His words show the war of the soul he is going through. He is constantly aware of who he is, how he act, and what he does. He also aware of these things in his image as a black man. He is two separate identities, and is defined and judged differently for each.
I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at examination-time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even beat their stringy heads.
This is the moment he realizes he is different from others. The Veil in which he talks about shows the development of double-consciousness he later talks about. His defiance or motivation not to lift the Veil shows he does not want to be on the other side of the color-line. His ability to out perform his classmates were even richer because he did not deny his black-self.
but to Adams the dynamo became a symbol of infinity. As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross.
Adams is recognizing a new religion, science or the dynamo.
looking up the straight definition for dynamo it is a machine for converting mechanical energy into electrical energy. It is a generator.
This quote is relating the power of science and this machine to the power of religion. The Adams is converting his faith toward the machine.
Adams began to ponder, asking himself whether he knew of any American artist who had ever insisted on the power of sex,
Adams is beginning to realize the power sex has on man. It seems that America's beginnings has pushed us towards the legacy of sex as taboo. The Puritans, as Adams mentions, considered it a sin, this (though we are clearly much more progressive now) has been a thought ingrained into society centuries later. Adam suggests that the Puritans understood that sex had power over man but did not understand it and so suppressed it.
Symbol or energy, the Virgin had acted as the greatest force the Western world ever felt, and had drawn man’s activities to herself more strongly than any other power, natural or supernatural, had ever done; the historian’s business was to follow the track of the energy; to find where it came from and where it went to; its complex source and shifting channels; its values, equivalents, conversions.
Religion or the Virgin has force and power just like the dynamo. Scientist need not disregard religion and religion need not disregard science. We should study religion and beliefs just as we study science, for religion also has power. It is the power of belief.
creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies
The detail of this line are all things used in laborious industrial type jobs. It shows metaphor both for a machine or factory and the bigger picture of lower class workers needed to work the factories or laborious jobs.