This is the first time since the beginning of the poem that the narrator has made an appearance. Why is this the time they've finally decided to chime in?

Obviously this part of the poem is about Carl and the experience in Rockland. We know he's in some psychiatric hospital, but this image really cemented his condition to me. It treats mental health as going across the void and using electroshock therapy to bring them back. A similar image I came up with was the use of defibrillators to revive people. Overall, this was a very sharp image.

Throughout the poem I've noticed things coming in three's. There was the three shrews, the three people with visions etc. I was always told three is an important number or the saying that good things come in three's. Interesting pattern and I'm curious as to if there is a more meaningful reason.

Ambiguous picture postcards brought me back to the "heap of broken images" from Wasteland. This whole line really caught my attention because it felt less doomsday wasteland and more like forgotten place/wasteland. He a trail of what's essentially just the city's best moments/monuments, where the rest of the city is just to waste away.

The poem reads very melodically. The syllables and rhyme scheme help carry it along. This reminds me at some parts (including this one) of "slave songs". I'm not sure if that's the intention, but I see it.

Throughout the poem I really was questioning whether or not Ma was a person. It wasn't until these lines that I pretty much confirmed that she's not a real person. This leads me to ask, who is Ma?

Repetition of the phrase "I shall return" makes me think its about control. He will return under his own terms and it will be his own choice.

I saw this very similar to another African American author- I believe Du Bois- who had talked about blackness as a veil. I see the same idea here. I wondered if there is a connection there, perhaps some inspiration.

Showing the images beforehand of the rivers crucial to African history helps to cement a history that people of African descent will never have. As a people stolen, they can't trace their roots. I see this as an attempt to establish comfort in the history of their people.

This poem was beautiful. This line I highlighted because it represents an awakening within African Americans. The author could have said "I, too, am an American", but said America. This separates the idea of simply belonging from being crucial for the country.

I felt like this really made the term race become a physical thing. It helped to turn an idea into a physical thing you can touch and fight one-on-one. Just one piece of rhetorically good writing that stood out to me.

This isn't necessarily a pattern in the essay, but just a pattern in life. By continuing the use of phrases like "kept down" and "helped up" we help to perpetuate systematic oppression. Regardless of intention, both of these statements place people of African descent below others.

An interesting note to end on, that the only real solution is to govern your mind. The duality of this idea to be free you must control- very intriguing.

This was a pattern I picked up on very quickly. Attributing whiteness to all these things leads to internalized oppression, as we've seen within the first part of this essay. I'm very interested what the "counter" side will be later on. I want to see the strategies taken to oppose this idea.

A trait of modernism is the stream of consciousness in poetry. I get that here with the odd line breaks and enjambment. Also, I see modern free verse. I really do get the sense that I'm speaking to a person and they're telling me their story.

Modernists seem to rely on images in their poetry. I think this a great example of an extension of modernism. The speaker uses the image of the dog to describe the Legion and even without the context of what exactly it is, I can make out some kind of idea.

I saw this as a connection to The Wasteland's "heap of broken images". I think the image still relates to the idea that fragments or scattered images are pieces to the whole, but can never be whole again.

I found the repetition of this particular stanza throughout the poem similar to responsorial psalms in church services. Its like when the priest prays and the church responds. Should there be some sense of reverence for Lenin in the same way Christians show Jesus in prayer? Or is it a way to envoke a similiar image?

The poem reads as a fight, Dempsey v. Dempsey. I feel like each side of the fight is supposed to represent different parts of the U.S. One Dempsey is the scrapper, trying to fight to rise back up- as is the case with the American people during the Great Depression. When the other side is the system that has kept them down and unable to keep fighting. By the end, the people can't fight anymore.

Another pattern throughout the poems has been referencing other pieces of history, culture or religions/myths. Maybe it's to draw out a connection to the past which Eliot likes better than his modern day.

The dry imagery has been present throughout the poems. The last poem was the only one without this same image, but I'd still consider it one of the most consistent patterns of The Wasteland.

I find it interesting that the speaker is calling to the reader. This tells more as a cautionary tale more than anything else. I made an annotation two lines above about trying to establish an "older" tone. If this was supposed to be read as a cautionary tale, then that use of language makes so much more sense.

The language in this poem felt very different from earlier poems and I think this line is where it clicked. The style and sound of it sounds more like older poetry and when he used "Gentile" it clicked for me. This was supposed to maybe sound "older" or more formal. I'm not sure why he wanted to interrupt the previous pattern, but it does read different.

I see this as part of the "broken images" Eliot described in the first poem. There's lots of people described in this stanza, I see this as set-up for a montage. Each person adding a moment, but we as readers never get the whole scene. Little fragments that can't make up a whole.

This interrupts the pattern we've previously established with the poems before. Everything has been dry and that was supposed to mean death. Will water and wetness show a different kind of death or is just supposed to juxtapose the title of the poem as some of the first lines?

I saw the image less as an actually alley and more like a grave. The second line made me think it was almost a mass grave because its where the dead lost their bodies. If it meant decay, the use of "lost" is really interesting. That's what makes me think that this isn't just about decay, but maybe having it taken from them.

A pattern I'm noticing is the references to other material/work. I've noticed a few other times where there have been references to either history, culture or in this case- myths. I wonder if its an artistic choice, or a chance to add another degree of depth to the context of the poem.

The image he sets up is incredibly important to understand the rest of the poem. Everything around him has fallen apart and it all just looks like pieces that will never be whole.

Several times, without warning, the speaker/speakers switch languages. Is this to set up a pattern of mixing language? Or is it an attempt to switch more frequently between speakers?

I just wonder the intention of the poem as a whole.. Very easy to read, but hard to understand. There's lot of patterns within the poem, sometimes stretching over several lines or calling back to previous lines.

I love this part of the poem. It moves quick and it feels almost delicate. I like the stream of consciousness tone throughout the poem, but especially in this section. I also reads very frantic too, which is interesting. I wonder if there were intentions on conveying this tone.

I find it interesting that the subject of the poem is the physician, but the poem is called "The Poor". Is the poem maybe written from the physician's voice, where he's mocking the family and altering the work to sound like a "white-knight" scenario?

The narrator definitely wants to let us know that the people he describes engage in behavior that isn't Holy. They make it a point to emphasize that they'll do bad things Monday- Saturday. That these people will save Sunday for God. Basically describing them as hypocrites.

I think that to limit the narrator's voice in a work is at best irritating and at worst oppressive. I really don't agree with this principle because it puts boundaries on writers and their craft.

I see this as a 3 line poem, not just 2. The title is essential to understand the poem. The narrator is experiencing a new piece of technology, the metro, and all he sees is faces passing quickly by. He's going so quick that all he sees is the pale faces in the reflection. This can reflect on the idea that technology was (still is) moving so fast that we can't keep up.

I felt like this established that where the man went when he died was not a choice. The narrator sees a man that should have gone to Heaven, but something stopped him from getting there. They ask how he got here, but then at the end says I know. Is our narrator embodying a God-like figure?

This is an interesting take on "love poems". The concept or the shared connection of love in fact does not provide physical benefits. It's very ghost-like. It's something that's sort of there, but you can't necessarily see it. This kind of ghost isn't haunting though, it comforting.

I found this interesting because this lends itself to the idea that there's no choice. Instead of asking why did the spider choose this spot at this height, Instead he asks what "brought" it there. Similarly, he asks what "steered" the moth this way. He makes it sound like they couldn't choose where they wanted to go, that external forces make our choices for us. To which we have no real say.

These lines undermine the idea that there is a difference between these roads at all. They're exactly the same, yet he says later on that he "took the one less traveled by". They're the same. So is he messing with the reader, or is he just unreliable?

I have seen a common occurrence throughout Masters' work where they all take place at Spoon River. Obviously, that's where the anthology is set. But since this has been a few of the poems in the collection, I think I can make a general assumption of what I'm supposed to think of Spoon River. There's a celebration of death. Its not necessarily a bad thing, death can bring relief or peace. This definitely flips the connotation we have.

This is definitely a "teaching moment" in the poem. To some degree, I felt that this was really reflective of duality. There is good an evil and no one specifically is one or the other because just as Masters said, you need to know one side to know the other. Even if you find yourself on one side- good or evil- you will still be associated with the other.

This sets up a lot for the poem. He is obviously a very lonely man. Looking at the rest of this poem as inner dialogue and reflection. The loneliness here continues throughout the poem from images ( Alone, as if enduring to the end/ A valiant armor of scarred hopes outworn.) to his "conversations".

I really appreciate the enjambment here because it helps to make the voice in the poem sound more natural. He does this in lines 3&4 too which I think really helps to change up the flow of the poem.

Double-conciseness, especially in conversations about the experiences of African Americans, refers to the appearance and reality of their identity. To others, people in this community will appear to be one way, when in reality they may not be. Constantly, their identity and worth is determined by what others in the "other world" assume about them.

The "veil" is his black skin. It effectively separates him from him and the "other world"- the white world. His "veil also acts as something that covers his identity. To his peers and everyone in the other world, he simply is a black boy. He will be reduced to one aspect of his identity and others will not try to understand anything more.

Initially, this struck me as the same kind of discourse we hear today. "I know an excellent colored man in my town" sounds really similar to "I have a black friend". Obviously this is decades apart, but its definitely interesting to see that language and social interactions haven't changed.

Perhaps we have an unreliable narrator because she's mentioned previously that there were children who left teeth marks on the bed. However, she's just revealed that she herself has bit the bed. Does this help to undermine her story?

We talked about the ghostly presence in our last class meeting and this struck the same feeling. Smells are ghost-like. You can't see them, but they linger. One moment a smell will be present, another moment and its gone. You forget and move on and then you smell it again. There's a lot about this smell the narrator has found and goes on about how it just won't go away. I wonder if this smell represents her descent into madness. The smell is always there and bothersome, then one day she's acclimated and its normal.

She begins to she herself (her spirit or her mentally) manifested in the wallpaper. She sees an actual woman in the wallpaper and though its not real or a ghost, its a physical embodiment of the circumstances she's in. She is the woman, trapped in the room, behind barred windows, with no way to get out.

There is much attention paid to how John will use the fact that he's a doctor to make the narrator believe in him. On occasion, he has mentioned that he's a doctor- implying that she should trust him. And the narrator mentions it all the time. He does this as a way to tell his wife "here's why you need to trust me" and she falls into believing him and tells herself that she should trust him. A pattern has been established throughout the story that because John is a doctor, he must be right, he must be trusted and that his wife ideally has no reason to not trust him.

This is incredibly manipulative of him. John will say that she's all he has, but then leaves her alone for long periods of time. He'll say she's his comfort, yet they don't share the same bed or even stay in the same area of the house. He makes the narrator feel burdensome because getting better is no longer about her. It's about him.

Adams by the time this is written is about 60 years old. The world he has always known is changing quickly. This whole work presents his thought process and pursuit of acceptance and understanding of these changes. He found that the way for him to adjust was to look at the schools of thought as forces. Perhaps these forces weren't opposite, but attracted like how he found them. This is a greater argument for finding the balance between science and religion for our own personal beliefs- that it doesn't have to be one or the other.

Both steam and electric current and the Cross and cathedral act as the most recognizable symbols for the 2 forces of belief. Steam and electricity are technological staples that push society forward, while the cross and cathedral are the symbols that represent Christianity. Both sets of images are recognizable and represent 2 different schools of thought while both contributing to the individual's views.

some background info on this place in time:

• panic of 1893 (until 1897): economic depression
• introduction of automobile
• chicago world fair (1893)
• paris exposition (1900)

LOVE the description of this. Turning an event (planet spinning in orbit) that just exists into an image of being "old fashioned" and more or less just mandatory (annual & daily) emphasizes his views on science. He's no longer impressed by the things that just are and always have been, instead is far more interested in the things man has actually made.

Usually ideas of science and religion are on polar opposites of ideology/theory. This imagery is the first in the body of work that forces the reader to look at the 2 as forces of belief instead of just ideologies. Force in this context as a push to believe in the thing.