There is a sentiment here about abandoning the drug fueled days of youth and turning instead with some remorse to the predicable life of adulthood. Somehow that seems a sad thing against the chaos and uncertainty of youth.

This might be the lament of the dawning of adulthood and its responsibilities encroaching on the lives of all those Mohammedan Angels being eulogized here. He's really lamenting a passing era of free love, free thinking, and freedom from any responsibility.

The narrator speaks of all the different people that passed through his life. He enumerates at length about the types of individuals who came and went--hipsters, the poor, the brilliant. It says a lot about how fluid and varied his circle of friends was.

The unexpected theme running through this poem is the infantilization of the black woman of the poem as "little one," "child," and "little child." Perhaps the attempt by the narrator is to show some form of endearment, but the reading by modern readers might trivialize the poem as one that diminishes black woman rather than elevates them.

I find it interesting the the black woman being address in the poem is referred to as a "little child." Perhaps the narrator addresses the child that will become the black woman of society. It is not clear why the narrator refers to black women this way. The narrator later remarks that the world is cruel, once again referring to the black woman as "child."

There is an attempt here to find common ground among the races. Although it not suggested which races are being addressed in the poem, the strained relations among whites and blacks at the time can be assumed.

The narrator adopts the vernacular of someone who might look down on the street performer. What is the statement being made here? Does the narrator adopt the voice of the oppressor to elevate herself above persecution?

The narrator appears to indicate here that the street performer would somehow be more dignified in more natural surroundings. There is a wistfulness in this passage for a time in history that neither the subject of the poem nor the narrator have any firsthand experience with.

There is here a sort of transcendence from the everyday experience of urban life to some other more romantic place--the Sahara desert, for example. There seems to be a recurring theme in some of the Harlem Renaissance poetry of elevating humanity, or showing how life could be better, by referencing the ancestors.

The question the narrator asks is why her/his life is idle, staying at home, while others have given the ultimate sacrifice of life amid "sodden mud and rain...."

The here is of disembodied men marching toward some undetermined destination. Could they be marching off to war? The passage also suggests that these men have not experienced death and are somewhat unexposed to the cruel realities of war.

The imagery is very much like T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland. The panoply of war, opposing factions, and wasted fields all suggest images of the battlefield.

This poem is very much centered on the body. The artifacts--breasts, eyes, hearts, brown limbs--all contribute to helping the reader focus on the body at the center of this poem.

The narrator of the poem aspires for something beyond what destiny has presented. Once again there is an upward movement in the poem, movement toward the sky, toward clouds, and toward the Sphinx. Stars, fires, and palm trees also have an upward movement. The narrator also portrays the upward lifting of the soul in the poem. All elements appear to be moving upward beyond a terrestrial realm.

The use of the neologism, usward, suggests a forward movement for the "us" of the poem. The word suggests a rising up out of the historical oppression endured by the "throng" of ancestors who preceded the narrator.

Ma Rainey here appears to represent something bigger than the adulation of her fans. The words, "Keep us strong . . . " suggest some kind of representation, a goddess, if you will, of the entire race; she represents someone who encourages greatness and accomplishment in others.

Who is the audience for this poetry? The words mimic the sounds of everyday language, but would the common man consume the words in this medium?

Some of the questions that emerge about this poem is, what came before it? What are the influences? Is sounds as if the influences may be primarily Jazz music? Is the laying down of words in the vernacular a purposeful flouting of conventions in poetry? What influenced most the style choice in this poem, the politics of the time or the music of the time?

Locke appears to draw a distinction between the "thinking Negro" and the "other" of his own community. Can there be unity among white and black communities when this juncture exists within Lock's take on his own community?

Locke appears to suggest that the Negro find some sense of cultural integrity by separating himself from mainstream white culture, Yet, he suggests here that the representative elements of the two race groups are out of touch.

Has the vision of the "dynamic phase" been achieved when young blacks today seem to be motivated by commercialism, corporate branding, and self-promotion?

Locke paints a rather bleak picture of the America Negro, ascribing to him a set of values (a stock figure perpetuated as an historical fiction) that may or may not exist. Surely the Negro experience in America is more varied than the way the are portrayed here by Locke.

It's curious that the three norms who have traditionally presided over the Negro problem come from Sociology, Philanthropy, and Race-leaders. Even more curious is that Locke leaves out the government, which has in many ways attempted to placate the masses with incentives to stay poor and uneducated.

Hughes is making a distinction here between the temperaments of whites and blacks. One is more restrained and acceptable; the other more ebullient, soulful, and unique.

Hughes seems to be conflating wanting to escape poverty and ignorance with wanting to be white. In Latino culture there is a concept known as "mejorar la rasa," to better the race, which means to improve the condition of the entire Latino culture by improving the individual first. Would Hughes refer to that as wanting to be white?

There is a distinction made here about the disparate nature of black and white voices. What is that difference? Does the difference make itself known in tone? Is one considered educated and the other not? Does wanting to write in a classic style denote wanting to be white? What is writing like a white person? Does this mean there is no such thing as standard English? Does wanting to communicate or write in standard English signify wanting to be more white?

Here the psychological division between Drummond and the men is evident. He is unlike the men that surround him in almost every way. His is virtually friendless and without the common addictions of most of the men who work in the Slot.

Drummond sees himself as separate from the other men, not only in how much they earn but in the amount of work accomplished during a work shift.

This is a classic example of doubling. Two individuals, Freddie Drummond and Bill Totts, reduced to the same type of work but decisively different in their approach and outlook. They could be described as two sides of the same coin.

The narrator attributes several qualities to a dead man--pride, loudness, and a doughty disposition. These qualities are somehow laudable enough to mention in this lamentation. There seems to be some awareness that any power that took down such a bigger than life character must have been an awesome power.

The narrator seems to intimate that the mind, the narrator's mind perhaps, would be better off, like the rose with its protective thorns, if it could one day protect itself with a hardened shell.

The narrator seems to be saying that the best neighbors are those who are held at bay by a fence. He may also be suggesting that those who do not intrude on others have the respect that distance brings and that intimacy creates contempt among neighbors.

The wall continues to be a metaphor for the psychological structures individuals construct between themselves and others.

I must suspend the habit of trying to understand a poem before I finish reading it. Already I have the notion that the poem is not about a wall but the raising of psychological structures that inhibit the full expression of thought and feeling toward one another.

An odd parallelism occurs here in which the main character discusses the other woman in the room. She is on some level referring to herself, a sort of somnambulist that exists in her own mind--an alter ego, perhaps.

Here the main character has more faith in her husband's assessment of her constitution than in her own internal sense of her body. She feels that simply getting out into society would alleviate some of the mental stresses of her confinement.

Here the main character appears to have given up autonomy of her own faculties, leaving decisions about her care to her physician husband. She calls her anger unreasonable, but there is no clue in the scene what might cause these sudden explosions of emotion. She once again trusts her husband's assessment of her outbursts as lacking "proper self-control."

It is still unclear if the main character suffers from some sort of mental disorder or if her husband is gaslighting her into submission. He apparently has complete control of her decisions even about her own care. She is of the opinion that he knows best how to cure her illness real or imagined.

Usually a song of farewell or remembrance of times gone by. Loosely translated as "for the sake of old times".

I thought this might be an allusion to geese flying south for the winter. It is the harvest moon after all. But after reading the entire poem, the passage suggests that time is flying quickly.

The allusion is to the ancient lyric poem, The Song of Roland, possibly written by Turold between 1040 and 1115.

Although I do not understand the usage of "alnage" in this context--alnage is a measure of woolen cloth--the narrator seems to suggest that poets tend to cover tried and true thematic ground repeatedly. The discontent the narrator references might be the discontent that comes with working in the same literary form and genre over time. The passage might suggest the poet is looking to free himself from the encumbrance of a particular school of poetry, thought, or structural approach to poetry.

The narrator emphasize the sameness of traditional poetry and seems to be bored with writing one more hackneyed poem in a tried and true form.

The narrator, Lucinda Matlock, narrates the poem from beyond the grave. She suggests that a life well lived is comprised of pleasant, sundry moments--picking shells by the river, parties, and raising a family.

A party game in which one of the players chases another around a ring formed by the rest of the players. This might be an allusion to Ring-Around-the-Rosie.

The author suggests here that the veracity of facts is determined by the majority of an infallible populace.

This passage about the relative meaning of truth resonates with me. Someone once said that a lie is big and bold and in your face. She also said that truth is very small, so you have to take pains to look for it. Truth will not aver itself. Truth simply is and needs no justification.

This is a shocking critique of America from someone who later joined the Communist Party in 1961. Dubois was aware then of the atrocities of the Bolshevik Revolution (1917) and the Polish genocide at the hands of the Russian army in WWII. He knew of Krhushchev's statements in 1956 that the Communist nations would bury the Capitalist nations. How did Dubois manage to summon tolerance for the sins of his Communist comrades and not for America?

About Dubois' work in The Philadelphia Negro, Anne Rice in the video says tht Dubois attributed much of the urban problems of inner city blacks to racism. What was the distinction between Dubois who succeeded in spite of racism and other blacks who succumbed to it? Here Dubois suggests he felt some sense of beating his oppressors by outdoing them in examinations, sports, and even violence.

There appears to be some association here with the constant primordial beating of ocean waves, the permanence of river flow, and the historical oppression, suffering and injustice of the narrator of the poem. In that regard, the eternal nature of water against an ocean shore is a metaphor for the eternal struggle of blacks in America.

This passage suggests a certain futility in the workings of men and society and that the sequence of time is a human construct, that even thought itself is chaotic, and that men finally as a last resort turn to force. I would challenge his characterization of thought as chaotic. The most orderly, thoughtful application of thought must be accomplished in order to fine tune the indistrial mechanisms he discusses in this piece. Perfectly tuned machines and engines cannot result from a chaotic mind. Perfection, such as a statue or work of art, can be splintered into a thousand pieces, resulting in chaos. But chaos cannot be repaired to a state of perfection. The egg, once scrambled, cannot be put back together again.

Adams seems to suggest here a kind of reverence for the awesome power of the engine. He says that individuals have an inherited instinct to be awestruck, to in fact revere the sheer infinite force of the engine.

Is Adams suggesting that the knowledge endemic to the literary canon is undecipherable to common men and women, that the books must be interpreted by teachers who how to apply the concepts of science and literature?

It is difficult to decipher the significance of this line without some sort of preamble to the poem. Critical to understanding the poem, to wrest some meaning or impression from the poem, one must research, contextualize, and know the historical parallels to the poem. What was happening historically at the time it was written. Are poets then writing for themselves in an arcane language, or are they writing to illuminate the public. Does this language effectively convey the political turmoil to the proper audience? Who is meant to receive this poem? Is the poem accessible to the subjects of the poem?

The passage intimates a cruel landscape and what it has done to even the most gentle beings--mothers. The harshness of the landscape has taken its toll on the family matriarch and hardened her spiritually like a tree stump.

The passage reads like an arcane language meant to illuminate the reader through sheer suggestion of images--barns, bus rides, West Virginia. These images paint a picture of a lost and languid rural area from a bygone time.