Laughing and singing is repeated a lot in this poem. Singing and blues shows up in "The Weary Blues." Does song sustain the spirit?

"He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool. Sweet Blues! Coming from a black man’s soul. O Blues!"

I thought of Langston Hughes, "My soul has grown deep like the rivers." Powerful currents/rivers are akin to a strong spirit. It is a sign of life and connection to the Earth. The river itself reminds me of veins, carrying blood to organs the same way civilizations set up near rivers for agricultural purposes. It gathers people, gives life, and is a sign of wealth (wealth of land, food, unity, resources)

White American society benefits from the labor and exploitation of people of color, but in their fault of dehumanizing them they didn't consider the humanity and strength that cannot be fully diminished. The ellipses signifies that the strength of the marginalized people and communities will continue growing. There is a sense of anticipation. This idea sort of reminds me of "They Feed They Lion" by Phillip Levine.

Possible connection to double-consciousness, Du Bois

Both Locke and Hughes discuss the risk of isolation

The idea of respecting and acknowledging the individuality of a black person, which Hughes proposed of the black artist, also appears throughout Locke's essay.

Shedding the stereotypical embodiment of "blackness," since it is restricting and misinforming

How similar is this person to the "Negro artist" that Hughes mentioned?

This shows the normalization of internalizing racist ideas and how that affects how a person perceives their identity.

This reminds me of a quote from Toni Morrison: "The question of what constitutes the art of a black writer, for whom that modifier is more search than fact, has some urgency. In other words, other than melanin and subject matter, what, in fact, may make me a black writer?" Both ponder the relationship race, art, and identity.

The recurring motif of fragments or scattered images appears. In this case, there is an emphasis on their untouchable quality.

This is one of three voices in the multi-voiced poem. This reminds me of the plurality of voice in "The Waste Land"

The gravestones emerge. This is another familiar image of death and desolation. There is also the strange pairing of life (blossom) and death (stone monuments).

Here is another moment where a person is paralyzed, or stuck in an in-between state.

I find it interesting that this title comes right after "burning" and "Burning burning burning burning" The dichotomy of fire and water in an apocalyptic setting is explored but water doesn't come as a salvation, or a bringer of life, but of more death.

Life (represented by lilacs) cannot exist without death and decay (soil). Life needs death and they coexist, despite how we attempt to compartmentalize them into two different categories.

The corpse that will potentially sprout from it's grave, another zombie or in-between life and death state.

Image of lushness, desire. Wetness and flowers all evoke images of desire. This is a great contrast to "dried tubers"

We are in between death and life. We are in constant state of limbo.

"Picked his bones" reminds me of bones being plucked from ashes at the end of the cremation process. The mention of bones or skeletal images is a pattern in this poem

The blind, clairvoyant prophet makes an appearance, the multi-voiced speaker takes on this role.

The dryness of this entire stanza adds to the apocalyptic feel. It's almost like a planet without life. Even the red faces are inhuman.

It's always important to respect the reader.

I'm surprised he wrote this, but still a clever piece of advice

Qualities of imagist poetry.

Comparing faces to petals that are attached to a dreary looking tree gives me an impression that the speaker thinks everyone is going through a collective state of sorrow, or maybe anticipation, hence the title.

I've seen a lot of authors describe how love has an intense, pleasurable physical response. This is refreshing because it subverts that. Love does not heal physical or emotional wounds.

Circles back to the speaker's initial thought- that love is not all. It doesn't solve all of your problems, and sometimes it's not worth striving for or prioritizing. It reminds me of advice like "focus on yourself"

I imagine an unmarked grave. The reader gets the sense of perpetual loneliness given by the cold waves that crash on the empty, gloomy shore.

It's like a scaled down version of the cycle of life and death in one scene involving tiny creatures- the spider, the heal-all flower, and the moth. The juxtaposition of living and dead is intriguingly haunting. Is the "design" the speaker referring to the cycle of dying and living?

The rhyme scheme is uniform in the last stanza compared to the other patterns in the first three. This gives the effect of closure to me.

They already have clear differences anyway, and one doesn't pose a threat to another, but the need to create a division is still there. But according to his neighbor, identities must be compartmentalized and organized. Perhaps his neighbor values the order that comes with division, or the need for privacy.

The pattern of verbs give the poem an animated quality, it almost reads like a narrative poem because it takes you through the movements as well as contain setting and characters.

The recurring idea that status and titles mean nothing, how yearning for superficial greatness leads to disappointment

In another class, I learned that clerks were basically human copy machines. They recreated documents, which seemed like a mentally exhausting and dull job. But they were fairly respectable. To call poets and kings "clerks of time" is interesting. It reminds me of being "products of their time." Like they did not truly create something truly original. They are also equated to a middle class job.

I think that the eyes she may/may not be imagining represent the pressure she feels to be a good wife, to cause less trouble. She may have a room of her own, she may have her own space, but she doesn't actually have freedom or privacy to do as she wishes.

The narrator is confident that writing is the best way to project her voice, it is her creative outlet. Like the many women who are oppressed during her time, she is forced into invisibility. The room women are trapped in according to Gilman is the veil is to Du Bois. The room as a prison is a symbol of domesticity and suppression. It has silenced women and made women invisible.

John is patronizing his wife, and his love is misguided. He suffocates her and makes sure she is completely dependent on him

I want to know more about this.

Again- appearance vs. reality. Privileged persons can wash their hands clean of racism because emancipation freed black slaves, but that is pure ignorance.

The black artisan will not be regarded as simply an artisan. Similar to Henry Adams, Du Bois discusses how a person examines their own identity, the perception of self, how reliable the perception of self is.

Du Bois uses the veil to talk about how he feels separated from the appearance of freedom, he was able to attend school with white children, but that appearance of freedom was only his perception. He can see through the veil but others cannot see him in full with the veil on him.

The repetition in this sentence was effective in that it helped me visualize the monument- plus it was a refreshing break from his monotonous, long, maze-like sentences. I am still confused about the symbol of the virgin though. What does she have to do with the art exactly? Was she a universal inspiration to all artists?

I find it interesting that the author brought up the attitude of the sexualization of women's bodies and sexuality throughout history.

The way he words parallels science/technology to spirituality and religion makes me think of the times in history when people would turn to reason rather than faith. Why does he make this connection?

The rise of power and strength, represented by the lion, is inevitable, because the downtrodden lowerclass builds resilience and unity over time. I say unity because all of them own just one lion, not everyone has a lion within them.

The dialect adds to the poem, I think this makes it more powerful than "their lion grows." The people working in this industrial setting own the powerful beast, but the lines before "They Lion grow" in every stanza make it sound as if the animal is sprouting from the harsh, infertile landscape of the industrial town. The lion grows despite the desolate soil.