Page 643 Chapter 14: Poetry bertolt brecht

Who built the seven gates of Thebes?

The books are filled with names of kings.

Was it kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?

And Babylon, so many times destroyed,

Who built the city up each time? In which of Lima’s houses, 5

That city glittering with gold, lived those who built it?

In the evening when the Chinese wall was finished

Where did the masons go? Imperial Rome

Is full of arcs of triumph. Who reared them up? Over whom

Did the Caesars triumph? Byzantium lives in song, 10

Were all her dwellings palaces? And even in Atlantis of the legend

The night the sea rushed in,

The drowning men still bellowed for their slaves.

Young Alexander conquered India.

He alone? 15

Caesar beat the Gauls.

Was there not even a cook in his army?

Philip of Spain wept as his fleet

Was sunk and destroyed. Were there no other tears?

Frederick the Great triumphed in the Seven Years War. Who 20

Triumphed with him?

Each page a victory,

At whose expense the victory ball?

Every ten years a great man,

Who paid the piper? 25

So many particulars.

So many questions.

1. List the different roles in the poem (invisible in history books) that members of the working classes have played.

2. Why are so many sentences in the poem questions? Is this only a rhetorical device?

3. What are the meanings and the irony of “Each page a victory”?

4. Explain “Every ten years a great man, / Who paid the piper?”

Suggestions for Writing

1. Where do women of the working classes appear in the poem? Why

2. To what extent and how were the working classes represented in the history you learned in school?

3. Write a poem or paragraph about a woman or an African American or a member of another historically dispossessed group reading history.

JONATHAN SWIFT (1667–1745)

Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin, Ireland and educated at Trinity College there. At various times, he was secretary to essayist and diplomat Sir William Temple, a vicar, a political pamphleteer and journalist, and Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. By 1720, he had become a passionate critic of British imperial exploitation of Ireland and much of his stinging satiric writing is on behalf of Irish national interests. Swift is best known for his prose writings, including Battle of the Books (1704), The Tale of a Tub (1704), Gulliver’s Travels (1726), and A Modest Proposal (1729).
A Description of the Morning (1709)

Now hardly here and there a hackney-coach

Appearing, showed the ruddy morn’s approach.

Now Betty from her master’s bed had flown,

And softly stole to discompose her own;

The slip-shod ’prentice from his master’s door 5

Had pared the dirt and sprinkled round the floor.

Now Moll had whirled her mop with dext’rous airs,

Prepared to scrub the entry and the stairs.

The youth with broomy stumps began to trace

The kennel-edge, where wheels had worn the place.¹ 10

The small-coal man was heard with cadence deep,

Till drowned in shriller notes of chimney-sweep:

Duns at his lordship’s gate began to meet;

And brickdust Moll had screamed through half the street.

The turnkey now his flock returning sees, 15

Duly let out a-nights to steal for fees:²

The watchful bailiffs take their silent stands,

And schoolboys lag with satchels in their hands.

Study and Discussion Questions

1. Spell out what each person described is doing and why.

2. What is the speaker’s attitude toward what is described?

3. What comment is the poem making on differences in social class?

4. What is the significance of the juxtaposition in the last two lines?

Suggestions for Writing

1. There is a long tradition of poems describing the morning’s beauty in pastoral terms, picturing glorious fields, idle shepherds, and so on. What relation does “A Description of the Morning” have to such poems?

2. Try capturing Swift’s tone in a paragraph describing the morning at a place you are familiar with.

THEODORE ROETHKE (1908–1963)

Theodore Roethke was born in Saginaw, Michigan, where his German immigrant grandfather and his father owned greenhouses. Roethke attended the University of Michigan and Harvard and taught for years at the University of Washington. His poetry includes Open House (1941), The Lost Son (1948), Praise the End! (1951), and The Waking (1953).

Dolor (1948)

I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,

Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper-weight,

All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage,

Desolation in immaculate public places,

Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard, 5

The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,

Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,

Endless duplication of lives and objects.

And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,

Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica, 10

Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,

Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,

Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces.

1. Look up dolor in the dictionary. How does the poem convey the various aspects of the definition of that word?

2. What does Roethke suggest is the effect of office work on office workers?

3. What specific kinds of office work does Roethke have in mind? It can be said that the boss also works in an office. Do you think Roethke’s poem refers to that person?

4. Many of the words in “Dolor,” like the title itself, are abstract rather than concrete. List some of those words. How does the extensive use of abstractions add to the effect of the poem?

Suggestion for Writing

1. Gather the materials to write a comparable poem about some kind

She’s a copperheaded waitress,

tired and sharp-worded, she hides

her bad brown tooth behind a wicked

smile, and flicks her ass

out of habit, to fend off the pass 5

that passes for affection.

She keeps her mind the way men

keep a knife—keen to strip the game

down to her size. She has a thin spine,

swallows her eggs cold, and tells lies. 10

She slaps a wet rag at the truck drivers

if they should complain. She understands

the necessity for pain, turns away

the smaller tips, out of pride, and

keeps a flask under the counter. Once, 15

she shot a lover who misused her child.

Before she got out of jail, the courts had pounced

and given the child away. Like some isolated lake,
her flat blue eyes take care of their own stark

bottoms. Her hands are nervous, curled, ready20

to scrape.

The common woman is as common

as a rattlesnake.

Study and Discussion Questions

1. Describe Ella’s character. What kind of person is she? What outside forces have helped shape who she is?

2. Would you call Ella a survivor? What are the means she uses to survive, psychologically and spiritually as well as physically?

3. The last line of this poem is “The common woman is as common as a rattlesnake.” How is Ella like a rattlesnake? List words and phrases in the poem that add to the rattlesnake image.

4. Grahn said in her preface to The Common Woman Poems that one of her goals in writing these poems was to change the stereotypes of the work that women do. How has your vision of the person who brings your coffee changed now that you’ve read Grahn’s poem?

5. Read the poem out loud. Locate and list some of the sound patterns in the poem. These may include end rhyme, internal rhyme, off rhyme, consonance, assonance. (See “How Poetry Works’’ for explanations of these terms.)

1. “Ella, in a square apron, along Highway 80” is the second in a sequence of seven poems Judy Grahn wrote about women and their lives. She called this sequence The Common Woman Poems. Freewrite for five or ten minutes on the word “common,” writing down all the meanings

2. Write a poetic portrait of a woman or man: (a) about their relation to their work and (b) using a controlling metaphor or image as Grahn does in “Ella . . .” with the rattlesnake image.

Hog Butcher for the World,

Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,

Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;

Stormy, husky, brawling,

City of the Big Shoulders: 5

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your

painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.

And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have

seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.

And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of 10

women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.

And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this

my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:

Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud

to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning. 15

Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall

bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;

Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage

pitted against the wilderness,

Bareheaded, 20

Shoveling,

Wrecking,

Planning,

Building, breaking, rebuilding,

Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth, 25

Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,

Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,

Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse,

and under his ribs the heart of the people,

Laughing! 30

Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked,

sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,

Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.

1. What criticisms of the city does the speaker accept? What is it about the city that the speaker celebrates nonetheless?

2. How does the style of the poem match the speaker’s feelings about Chicago?

3. What do the way the city is personified and the dismissal of “the soft little cities” tell us about the speaker’s values?

1. What do the treatment of the city’s problems and the way physical labor is portrayed in the poem suggest about the social class of the speaker?

2. Write a poem or an image-filled prose piece about the city or town you live in. Like “Chicago,” it might be a poem of praise. If you don’t like where you live, you might consider writing a parody of Sandburg’s style.

JIMMY SANTIAGO BACA (b. 1952)

Of Chicano and Apache heritage, Jimmy Santiago Baca was born in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and spent much of his childhood in an orphanage, until he ran away at age eleven. He lived on the street and at twenty was convicted of drug possession and sent to a maximum security prison. He taught himself to read there and soon began writing poetry. His first book, Immigrants in Our Own Land: Poems (1979), was a critical success, and he has since published Swords of Darkness (1981), Black Mesa Poems (1989), and other volumes of poetry, as well as the essay collection Working in the Dark: Reflections of a Poet of the Barrio (1992).

So Mexicans Are Taking Jobs From Americans (1979)

O Yes? Do they come on horses

with rifles, and say,

Ese gringo,¹ gimmee your job?

And do you, gringo, take off your ring,

drop your wallet into a blanket 5

spread over the ground, and walk away?

I hear Mexicans are taking your jobs away.

Do they sneak into town at night,

and as you’re walking home with a whore,

do they mug you, a knife at your throat, 10

saying, I want your job?

Even on TV, an asthmatic leader

crawls turtle heavy, leaning on an assistant,

and from a nest of wrinkles on his face,

a tongue paddles through flashing waves 15

of lightbulbs, of cameramen, rasping

“They’re taking our jobs away.”

Well, I’ve gone about trying to find them,

asking just where the hell are these fighters.

The rifles I hear sound in the night 20

are white farmers shooting blacks and browns

whose ribs I see jutting out

and starving children,

I see the poor marching for a little work,

I see small white farmers selling out 25

to clean-suited farmers living in New York,

who’ve never been on a farm,

don’t know the look of a hoof or the smell

of a woman’s body bending all day long in fields.

I see this, and I hear only a few people 30

got all the money in this world, the rest

count their pennies to buy bread and butter.

Below that cool green sea of money,

millions and millions of people fight to live,

search for pearls in the darkest depths 35

of their dreams, hold their breath for years

trying to cross poverty to just having something.

The children are dead already. We are killing them,

that is what America should be saying;

on TV, in the streets, in offices, should be saying, 40

“We aren’t giving the children a chance to live.”

Mexicans are taking our jobs, they say instead.

What they really say is, let them die,

and the children too.

Study and Discussion Questions

1. To whom is the poem addressed; who is Baca’s imagined reader? How does Baca’s portrait of the reader and the reader’s culture make you feel?

2. How would you characterize Baca’s tone in this poem? Does the tone change as the poem goes on?

3. How, according to the poem, do Americans characterize Mexicans? What emotions motivate these characterizations?

4. What, instead, does Baca say is the true picture of these Mexicans?

5. What does the situation Baca writes about in this poem have to do with money and social class? Give examples from the poem of behavior motivated by people wanting to hold on to their money or property and of people wanting to make a living.

6. The starving children appear in the middle of the poem and their image dominates by the poem’s end. How does this image change the argument and the tone of the poem? Do you find it effective?

Suggestions for Writing

1. Analyze the extended image in the five-line stanza that begins: “Below that cool green sea of money.’’

2. Take a position on immigration into the United States. You might look up statistics on immigration patterns over the past hundred years. Does immigration help, hurt, or have little effect on the quality of life and the availability of work for most Americans? Has the rise of the global economy over the past twenty or so years changed the immigration issue in any significant way? Baca’s poem raises ethical as well as economic concerns; how in fact do we respond to the world’s starving children?

JULIA ALVAREZ (b. 1950)

Julia Alvarez was born in the Dominican Republic and emigrated to the United States in 1960. She studied at Connecticut College, Middlebury College, and Syracuse University and now teaches literature and creative writing at Middlebury College in Vermont. Alvarez has written poetry, Homecoming (1984) and The Other Side/El Otro Lado (1995); fiction, How the Garciá Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), In the Time of the Butterflies (1994), and !Yo! (1997); and a book of essays, Something to Declare (1998).

Homecoming (1984)

When my cousin Carmen married, the guards

at her father’s finca¹ took the guests’ bracelets

and wedding rings and put them in an armored truck

for safekeeping while wealthy, dark-skinned men,

their plump, white women and spoiled children 5

bathed in a river whose bottom had been cleaned

for the occasion. She was Uncle’s only daughter,

and he wanted to show her husband’s family,

a bewildered group of sunburnt Minnesotans,

that she was valued. He sat me at their table 10

to show off my English, and when he danced with me,

fondling my shoulder blades beneath my bridesmaid’s gown

as if they were breasts, he found me skinny

but pretty at seventeen, and clever.

Come back from that cold place, Vermont, he said, 15

all this is yours! Over his shoulder

a dozen workmen hauled in blocks of ice

to keep the champagne lukewarm and stole

glances at the wedding cake, a dollhouse duplicate

of the family rancho, the shutters marzipan, 20

the cobbles almonds. A maiden aunt housekept,

touching up whipped cream roses with a syringe

of eggwhites, rescuing the groom when the heat

melted his chocolate shoes into the frosting.

On too much rum Uncle led me across the dance floor, 25

dusted with talcum for easy gliding, a smell

of babies underfoot. He twirled me often,

excited by my pleas of dizziness, teasing me,

saying that my merengue had lost its Caribbean.

Above us, Chinese lanterns strung between posts 30

came on and one snapped off and rose

into a purple postcard sky.

A grandmother cried: The children all grow up too fast.

The Minnesotans finally broke loose and danced a Charleston

and were pronounced good gringos with latino hearts. 35

The little sister, freckled with a week of beach,

her hair as blonde as movie stars, was asked

by maids if they could touch her hair or skin,

and she backed off, until it was explained to her,

they meant no harm. This is all yours, 40

Uncle whispered, pressing himself into my dress.

The workmen costumed in their workclothes danced

a workman’s jig. The maids went by with trays

of wedding bells and matchbooks monogrammed

with Dick’s and Carmen’s names. It would be years 45

before I took the courses that would change my mind

in schools paid for by sugar from the fields around us,

years before I could begin to comprehend

how one does not see the maids when they pass by . . .

—It was too late, or early, to be wise— 50

The sun was coming up beyond the amber waves

of cane, the roosters crowed, the band struck up

Las Mañanitas,² a morning serenade. I had a vision

that I blamed on the champagne:

the fields around us were burning. At last 55

a yawning bride and groom got up and cut

the wedding cake, but everyone was full

of drink and eggs, roast pig, and rice and beans.

Except the maids and workmen,

sitting on stoops behind the sugar house, 60

ate with their fingers from their open palms

windows, shutters, walls, pillars, doors,

made from the cane they had cut in the fields.
Study and Discussion Questions

1. List what has been done to prepare for the wedding.

2. What do we know about the speaker of the poem?

3. Why does she repeat her uncle’s words about all of this being hers?

4. Characterize the uncle.

5. What vision does the speaker of the poem have? Why is it significant?

6. Discuss the irony of the poem’s last five lines, when the maids and workmen eat the wedding cake. Also, what famous quote does this scene bring to mind?

7. Discuss the line: “how one does not see the maids when they pass by . . .”

1. Who are the different groups of people who inhabit this poem? Describe each group.

2. Write a paragraph looking at this wedding from the perspective of one of the maids or workmen.