An’ some folks sits dere waitin’ wid deir aches an’ miseries, Till Ma comes out before dem, a-smilin’ gold-toofed smiles
Rather akin to Hughes’ sentiments about the black artist needing to embrace themselves and their blackness without attempting to posture themselves after white artists as they will never completely have ownership over their success. That only by living authentically owning themselves and their culture could they carve out their own brand off success.
Li’l an’ low; Sing us ’bout de hard luck Roun’ our do’; Sing us ’bout de lonesome road We mus’ go. . . .
Even without trying the poem becomes a song, the rhyming scheme made original and new-like by the thick southern dialect.
Ma Rainey
Immediately vernacular connects this poem to Hughes’, embracing the chopped, rhythmic dialect of the southern negro with the soothing connotations of comfort and home.
particular significance in the reestablishment of contact between the more advanced and representative classes is that it promises to offset some of the unfavorable reactions of the past
The permeation of the negro’s oppression is clear here, as it does not foresee a potion risk problem in the reestablisent of contact, appropriation of the negro’s culture.
I wonder if the state of our present day would shock the New Negro, if they would gape and stare as they watch the Kardashians flip their corn rolls (or as white people call them “boxer braids”) and white girls inject their lips and butt cheeks, mimicking the very attributes which in the past qualified the Negro as barely human.
The popular melodrama has about played itself out, and it is time to scrap the fictions, garret the bogeys and settle down to a realistic facing of facts.
Instead of merely living by the social standards constructed by white Americans the negro must take control and ownership over their own life and their own story, a sentiment quite revolutionary, nearly as much as the new negro itself.
The Old Negro, we must remember, was a creature of moral debate and historical controversy. His has been a stock figure perpetuated as an historical fiction partly in innocent sentimentalism, partly in deliberate reactionism. The Negro himself has contributed his share to this through a sort of protective social mimicry forced upon him by the adverse circumstances of dependence
In short the new negro has become a subject instead of a mere object, able to exercise agency.
Oh, be respectable, write about nice people, show how good we are,” say the Negroes. “Be stereotyped, don’t go too far, don’t shatter our illusions about you, don’t amuse us too seriously. We will pay you,” say the whites
In a sense don’t be too negro and yet don’t be too white because you can’t be on the same level; what sort of existence is this, if it can be called that to begin with.
Lord correctly and quietly. We don’t believe in ‘shouting.
The white way is the right way.
The children go to a mixed school. In the home they read white papers and magazines. And the mother often says “Don’t be like niggers
The class standing of the nergo family immediately correlating to the successful assimilation into the European white culture, quantifying their importance by how much of their identity they have lost; in a career reliant on eloquent honesty and social critique the Negro could never be a successful writer unless they embraced the very thing society would rather they forsake, themselves. However, this excludes them from the privilege of ever being celebrated as a successfully American writer for Negro is not considered American, despite the slave’s sacrifice.
Comrade Lenin of Russia Rises in the marble tomb: On guard with the fighters forever – – The world is our room!
The use of multiple voices from different characters and identities as they demand equality on the event of death and sacrifice parallels to the every shifting characters of the Wasteland.
Everybody give the big boy a hand, a big hand for the big boy, Dempsey. failure king of the U.S.A.
The correlation to the present, the dissatisfied sentiments and down right rabid thirst for revolution, brings to mind more of the Civil Rights movement than the war (I'm assuming theyre referring to WWI but I could be wrong).
coughTRUMPcough
dereliction
echoing the Wastland's sentiments
verdurous
connotations to life, birth, sunshine and spring which connects with the other images of the Wasteland, Stein and other modernist poets.
If there were rock And also water And water A spring A pool among the rock If there were the sound of water only
linking two "worlds" that are seemingly at conflict, land and water, emphasizing the possibility of life in the synthesis of the two "worlds"
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender Which an age of prudence can never retract By this, and this only, we have existed Which is not to be found in our obituaries Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor In our empty rooms
The bitter bite of life, knowing it has only been lived when it is ending, the certainty death brings, a sort of irony
Who is the third who walks always beside you? When I count, there are only you and I together
otherworldly implication of ghostly beings, those between this world and the other, the speaker here apparently unaware of their second sight
I was neither Living nor dead
another characteristic of the "doubling" theme, a character living in-between two worlds, a living and a dead one, suggesting "second sight" and evoking the solitude such ability brings with it
And the dry stone no sound of water.
Reminiscent of Moses' grave sin which barred him from the Promised Land forever, his doubt in God's power when instructed to speak to a boulder, and demand water from it, opting to strike it with his walking stick instead, adding to the punishment of wandering the dessert for forty years with the rest of the Jews, after falling into idol worship.
April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow
a clear doubling with the seasons happening, a very decisive line for each season's metaphor and symptomatic description connoting conflicting motivations and expectations.
The Burial of the Dead
the epigraph preceding the poem translating to "For with my own eyes I saw the Sibyl hanging in a jar at Cumae, and when the boys said to her, 'Sibyl, what do you want?' she replied, 'I want to die,'" from Petronius's Satyricon (according to google)
No climate.
It is rose in hen.
Wives of great men rest tranquil.
rich young men with fine eyes
https://goo.gl/images/XSQEFz) America’s greatest lesson on capitalism, it gets you all the girls.
Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold
https://goo.gl/images/tt49mM Read this poem in in many different classes and the unbelievable “forgive me” always reminds me of mischievous pets eating their owners food, like Garfield and his lasagna, no matter how much they love you they just can’t help their gluttony.
imaginations
https://goo.gl/images/Rc5gk3\)) Cant think of imagination without thinking of the greatest product of America’s imagination; Sponebob.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I- I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.
This is one of my favorite poems, the last line always reminding me of the movie “Mr. Nobody” with Jared Leto about a man who had the ability to live out the reality of every big life decision he was confronted with.
Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same
Rhyming scheme reminiscent of formulaic poetry from days and practices of the past creating quite a romantic, nostalgic feeling throughout the length.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both
Introducing a religious theme, alluding to the proverb which instructs Christians to follow Jesus’ path, “the road less traveled”
And what is love but a rose that fades? Life all around me here in the village: Tragedy, comedy, valor and truth, Courage, constancy, heroism, failure
Quite the Shakespearean theme being invoked throughout the poem’s length. All the allusion to “life’s a stage and we each must play our part” quote and his sonnets.
And you that ache so much to be sublime,
Rather reads as a criticism or a response to Adam’s autobiographically recorded desire to be free of America’s oppressive culture of decorum.
Like Roland’s ghost winding a silent horn
The cry from Roland’s oliphant was answered by the aid of Charlemagne’s “Holy” Army, whereas our Mr.Flood’s cry is to no one but the path that he walks, and the bird that he toasts to.
There comes John, and I must put this away,—he hates to have me write a word
The narrator’s fear of discovery reveals that perhaps these journal entries are not as honest of a source to rely upon, not only is her mind and perspective warped by the diminishing identity and consuming hysterical fear, but by the chance of her innermost thoughts falling into the hands of one who would view such accounts as symptomatic and troubling, grounds for further suffocating “treatment.”
physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency—what is one to do?
Unable to even exert dominion and sovereignty over the state and welfare of her own body, imprisoned by the judgement of a patriarchal society who deemed women too weak, too afflicted by the seduction of sinful flesh’s, the narrator’s need to exert some expression of her identity, her despair, regardless if it contradicted the ruling judgement of The Man of The House.
the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes; there is no true American music but the wild sweet melodies of the Negro slave; the American fairy tales and folklore are Indian and African; and, all in all, we black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness
Merging lyric and prose to hurtle readers through a history of suffering, Dubois has carved a place at the table through an eloquent representation of the ethos of strength and what defines “American” in its true authentic reality.
How does it feel to be a problem
This is why storytelling is such a powerful tool of the oppressed resisting the dehumanization of their predicament, identification through the eloquent articulation of simple truth. This is how you write. This is how writing saves lives.
but the nearest approach to the revolution of 1900 was that of 310, when Constantine set up the Cross
symbol
Infinity meaning the endless stream of possibility produced by human ingenuity; in his life time alone he witnessed the effect of human innovation completely changing the face of society through the achieved speed of transportation shrinking the world considerably, just as recognition of a round world expanded it some centuries before.