Poetry for Students Vol. 10

18 Poetry for Students

Poem Summary.

Lines 1-7

Introducing the speaker, the opening stanza

uses the second-person voice, describing the

speaker as “you.” This strategy aligns readers with

the speaker and places them in the midst of the ac-

tion of the poem. The stanza also introduces the

brief story the poem will tell by situating it in time.

“You” walk to a nearby hot-dog stand “after you

finish your work, after you do your day.” For this

second-person speaker, work entails reading and

writing, activities that are intellectual and solitary.

Such work might well describe that of a poet like

Rukeyser, and the speaker may be understood as

loosely autobiographical.

The repetition of the word “after” in lines 1-4

emphasizes the contrast between such intellectual

work and the visit to the hot-dog stand that is the

main subject of the poem. While the speaker’s work

is described in general and abstract terms, Rukeyser

is very concrete and specific in her description of

the world the speaker enters as she sets out on her

walk. In this opening stanza, Rukeyser describes

the neighborhood in which the speaker lives in

terms of its geographical location and its broad his-

torical context: “East Harlem in the twentieth cen-

tury.” This contrast between the abstract and the

concrete is only the first of a series of pairs of op-

posite terms, or binaries, that Rukeyser sets up

throughout the poem. Thus she subtly introduces

the poem’s theme of difference. The fact that the

unpaired last line of the stanza (line 7) breaks the

abcbdbpaired rhyme scheme, as it does in each

stanza to follow, further underscores the idea of dif-

ference.

Lines 8-14

The poem’s second stanza describes the

cityscape that the speaker passes through on her

way to the hotdog stand. It is a scene of urban

squalor, suggesting poverty and other related social

ills, such as substance abuse and violence. Most of

the focus is on this threatening and depressing en-

vironment. But there is an implicit contrast between

the speaker, who lives a life of the mind as she

works all day, and the very tangible physical at-

tributes of the street she walks—a contrast between

the intellect and the world. The speaker herself is

referred to only once, again in the second-person,

in a vulnerable relation to a loitering man whom

she passes “who’d like to break your back.” The

longer, unpaired last line of the stanza (line 14)

again introduces contrast: “But here’s a brown

woman with a little girl dressed in rose and pink,

too.” They are not threatening or hopeless, as are

the other images in this stanza. In this one line,

three warm colors are mentioned. Through the

woman and girl, the more positive and hopeful at-

tributes of the environment are associated with

femininity.

Lines 15-21

In this stanza the speaker arrives at the hot-dog

stand. Here she encounters the vendor with whom

she will engage in a kind of philosophical debate for

the rest of the poem. It is significant that in this stanza

the speaker shifts from a second-person to first-per-

son voice. Rukeyser turns “you” into “I,” reversing

the terms of a binary opposition. This stanza is also

Ballad of Orange and Grape