You do not know the monster men Inhabiting the earth, Be still, be still, my precious child, I must not give you birth!
I interpret this as the fear that Black women felt of bringing a child to all the racism and oppression still present even today. The usage of "precious child" is heartbreaking.
How tears and torturing distress May masquerade as happiness
They're disguising their pain with smiles. This could be talking of an optimism and "fake it til you make it" attitude amongst the New Movement.
And put it in a little bottle on a shelf in the library, That’s what they done to this shine, ain’t it? Bottled him.
The usage of the bottle as a symbol in this poem reminded me of the "ginger jar" from "To Usward" by Gwendolyn B. Bennett. The man's Black soul is being repressed by those around him but the narrator recognized his shine and beauty.
You need me, Christ! It is no roseate dream
Nelson could be implying that the New Negro Movement can only be done if strong actions are taken instead of participating in idle jobs like sewing because reality is a lot more harsh than being able to "dream" it away.
Orange gleams athwart a crimson soul Lambent flames; purple passion lurks
The usage of strong fiery colors and images completes and emphasizes the anger and rage of the narrator of the poem. It's almost as if the anger has erupted.
I sit and sew—my heart aches with desire—
There's a lot of anger here where the voice of the poet is frustrated and feels like they are not doing anything of importance by just sitting and sewing while others are out in the "mud" fighting and working.
Singin’, sobbin’, strummin’ slow … Singin’ slow, sobbin’ low. Strummin’, strummin’, strummin’ slow …
Like Brown and Hughes, Bennet incorporates music into their poem through not only the words but the arrangement and repetition of words, creating a very song-like flow.
With tendrils drinking at the Nile …
Like in Langston Hughes poems, Bennet uses a geographically and historically important river. There's also a lot of usage of nature and plants in this poem such as the tendrils. I wonder what the significance of this specific plant the poem is intending to imply. Below is a picture of a tendril taken by Jon Sullivan.
Like jars of ginger we are sealed
Ginger jars were historically used to transport special Asian spices across the waters to the Western world and like Black voices they are sealed and enclosed but Bennet introduces the idea of their voices being protected in this jars; ready to be let out with their "pungent" songs.
White devils with pitchforks Threw black devils on, Slim thought he’d better Be gittin’ along.
There's a storytelling element in this piece that the rhymes only add on to that element. This piece seems more humorous than the rest as it's casting white people as devils in hell pitchforking Black devils with a plot twist where Slim realizes Hell is no different than Earth.
You sang: Walk togedder, chillen, Dontcha git weary. . . . The strong men keep a-comin’ on The strong men git stronger.
The singing stanzas seem to represent the unity in the same way songs did amongst Black slaves. Here they're singing about preserving through all the oppression white Americans have acted upon. By fighting through it all, their "men" just keep getting stronger.
An’ Ma lef’ de stage, an’ followed some de folks outside.
Ma Rainey is one with the people it seems; people scramble to watch her because she understands the struggle of the what I assume is the poor and working class. Instead of continuing to sing on stage while a storm causes trouble, she follows the pained and affected.
Coming from a black man’s soul. O Blues!
The jazz/blues feel is even more evident in this poem by the repetition of "O Blues!"; it's replicating a chorus or chant. The rhymes in the poem are also not formed to a certain pattern. They create a song like feel nonetheless.
Nobody’ll dare Say to me, “Eat in the kitchen,” Then.
The short line make the flow of the poem move quickly with a staggered feel. The quickness alongside the varied stanzas sizes remind me of the freeform way of jazz.
I’ve known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers.
The rivers have been embedded in the Earth for a long time so to have known them from their beginning infers a similar "ancient" belonging to the Earth.
The ordinary man has had until recently only a hard choice between the alternatives of supine and humiliating submission and stimulating but hurtful counter-prejudice.
It seems that either fighting or not fighting for justice is tough because fighting doesn't mean success. There's pain and hardships in both choices.
Therefore the Negro today wishes to be known for what he is, even in his faults and shortcomings, and scorns a craven and precarious survival at the price of seeming to be what he is not
There's a want of being true to themselves, regardless of faults. They don't want to be anything they're not even if it might do good for their "image".
In art and letters, instead of being wholly caricatured, he is being seriously portray eel and painted .
Its like they are finally being humanized and viewed as just not an idea, but as a human being.
I am ashamed, too, for the colored artist who runs from the painting of Negro faces to the painting of sunsets after the manner of the academicians because he fears the strange unwhiteness of his own features.
The fear of being too "unwhite" in art very real, even today, because we're so used to consuming very white media, that creating anything unlike that, can always feel like taking a risk.
But, to my mind, it is the duty of the younger Negro artist, if he accepts any duties at all from outsiders, to change through the force of his art that old whispering “I want to be white,” hidden in the aspirations of his people, to “Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro–and beautiful”?
The "old whispering" and this white shadow that follows artists can very well be acting subconsciously so I like the switch from acknowledging that shadow to questioning its existence.
Without going outside his race, and even among the better classes with their “white” culture and conscious American manners, but still Negro enough to be different, there is sufficient matter to furnish a black artist with a lifetime of creative work.
The white world is not the only world Black artists can turn to for inspiration or material; Black lives and stories are diverse and there's so much to be written about. As a Mexican, I find that there's still so much to uncover through writing about my culture; not all immigrant stories are the same.
voluptuous water
The sexualizing of water reminded me very much of Odilon Redon's "Andromeda" for the way their painting is portraying a naked women surrounded by moving water; there's something vulnerable about both the line and image.
while the imagination strains after deer
This line reminded me of Robert W. Chanler's "Leopard and Deer" because of the subject matter having to do with a deer but also the image of straining, forcing oneself upon deers is similar to the way the leopards in the screen are hunting and terrorizing the animal.
He was not a deep thinker. He had no faith in new theories. All his norms and criteria were conventional.
This character feels very bland, like he's a blank canvas with no true identity.
Freddie Drummond sat in the auto, quite composed, alongside Catherine Van Vorst; but looking out of Freddie Drummond’s eyes was Bill Totts, and somewhere behind those eyes, battling for the control of their mutual body, were Freddie Drummond, the sane and conservative sociologist, and Bill Totts, the class-conscious and bellicose union workingman.
It's clear that Freddie want to follow order while Bill wants to do the opposite and join the disorder of the mob.
It was Freddie Drummond, irreproachably clothed and comported, seated at his study desk or facing his class in “Sociology 17,” who saw Bill Totts, and all around Bill Totts, and all around the whole scab and union-labor problem and its relation to the economic welfare of the United States in the struggle for the world market.
Freddie's switch from Bill to his identity as a professor is similar to the idea of double consciousness. He analyzes his character as Bill from the eyes of Freddie.
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
This line is where I interpreted the narrator to be someone experiencing an abusive relationship. They feel like they can't escape; they feel trapped.
That falls incessant on the empty shore,
I like the use of the waves being used here. The sea is still going to be the sea even after death. I can even imagine the body being engulfed by the water and leaving the now "empty shore."
Unthorned into the tending hand
The image of a rose vs. the delphinium is interesting because the former has this outer "armor" of thorns and while the delphinium does not, it still poses a threat to the hand that tends it. While googling an image of the flowers, I found this painting done by an artist named Andre Lucero.
Than none at all. Provide, provide!
Going off the previous line about "boughten friendship", I interpret the title and last line "Provide, provide!" to highlight this shallow way of viewing friends as people that provide you something.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
Immediately the image of a tree branch diverging, their root once one comes to mind and after reading the rest of the poem, this first line is very effective in engraving the image of separation into the reader's head.
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
I love the imagery of these two contrasting trees. Apples and pine cones are entirely different things that the trees grow so the usage of those specific trees makes this division of neighbors even greater.
Shouting to the wooded hills, singing to the green valleys.
Again, there's a lot of imagery of nature where it serves a sort of escape and freedom as they "shout" out to nature.
But the pine tree makes a symphony thereof.
There's this blend of music with nature; the imagery of both working together is quite clear and makes me wonder if it's saying that each rely on each other.
A valiant armor of scarred hopes outworn.
The juxtaposition of this line really stood out to me. It seems to me this man used to be full of hope and courage but now seems to have been weakened, "scarred".
“I’ve got out at last,” said I, “in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!”
Does this moment signify the narrator's understanding of the truth behind John and Jane's intention to "cage" her? She claims she can't be put back, as knowledge cannot be reversed.
And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern. I don’t like it a bit. I wonder—I begin to think—I wish John would take me away from here!
John is always dismissing anything the narrator says as he's a man of facts and science which reminds me of Adam's realization that those of science and facts can be so narrow-minded. So it is interesting to see that the narrator wishes for John when she find herself imagining a women behind the wallpaper.
One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.
Through a second read, I like this line because it nods at the way this wallpaper represents a barrier in which women find themselves trapped inside a domestic marriage and in the narrator's case, unable to do things she enjoys such as writing.
and he saw himself,—darkly as through a veil; and yet he saw in himself some faint revelation of his power, of his mission.
This is another line that reminded of Adams' line "The best chemist in the place had probably never heard of Venus... of the Virgin... of dynamos or automobiles or radium; yet his mind was ready to feel the force of all, though the rays were unborn and the women were dead." They both seem to have a sort of gut-feeling of the truth they want to discover and the change they strive to make.
Whatever of good may have come in these years of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon the Negro people,—a disappointment all the more bitter because the unattained ideal was unbounded save by the simple ignorance of a lowly people.
This to me has a connection to Adams' line about a haunting. Here a shadow of the prejudice and oppression from the days of slavery is not suddenly lifted by the Emancipation but it lingers and it haunts.
It is in the early days of rollicking boyhood that the revelation first bursts upon one, all in a day, as it were.
There's a sort of existential realization about the color of one's skin that's so sudden although one has always looked the same, it had never become conscious.
When Adams was a boy in Boston, the best chemist in the place had probably never heard of Venus except by way of scandal, or of the Virgin except as idolatry; neither had he heard of dynamos or automobiles or radium; yet his mind was ready to feel the force of all, though the rays were unborn and the women were dead.
To me these are the lines that made sense of Adam's place. I think he has realized that there are forces out there that are unknown to us yet they still exist. Atoms were still atoms before they became known and understood by humans and he's opening his mind to the undiscovered forces around him.
In these seven years man had translated himself into a new universe which had no common scale of measurement with the old. He had entered a supersensual world
I can only imagine what it was like having an overwhelmingly powerful technology with no form of measurement or understanding. What do you reference it to when trying to comprehend it? I just love the line, "He had entered a supersensual world."
which was almost exactly Adams’s own age.
I feel like relating the "destructive" motor to Adam's age is subtly implying Adam is broken or similar in some way to that of the inefficient motor.
Earth is eating trees, fence posts
I wonder if this is talking about deforestation?
Out of the gray hills Of industrial barns, out of rain
I can imagine a gray factory setting polluting the air as it rains and a bus exhaust blowing onto the road.
the oil-stained earth
There's something about "the oil-stained earth" to describe this world that caught my eye, particularly, the way stains are never really a good thing but instead an imperfection. It perfectly finished this image of a dirty land.