Poetry for Students Vol. 10

Volume 10 25

clearly identifiable, as “unmistakable” as the labels
on the two drink machines in “Ballad.”

But the context and the tone of 1973’s “Bal-
lad” are radically different from those of “Poem.”
The poem takes place here in the United States, in
a neighborhood the poet/speaker inhabits. Ru-
keyser attempts to apply the moral vision forged
by her abhorrence of the World Wars to a more
subtle and intimate local situation—a poor neigh-
borhood in which the speaker works. Though the
poem is, in some ways, a exhortation typical of her
earlier style, an older and perhaps wearier Rukeyser
recognizes that the poet’s work of making mean-
ing and therefore bringing about social change is
in many ways ineffectual, even in a modest local
context. She wrote the poem while she was in-
volved with the Writers’ and Teachers’ Collabora-
tive in East Harlem, an effort through which
Rukeyser expressed her commitment to pass along
a sense of poetic mission to the underprivileged.
Thus, when the speaker asks the vendor “How can
we go on reading / and make sense out of what we
read?— / How can they write and believe what
they’re writing, / the young ones across the street?”
she sees him as a force eroding the values of em-
powerment through language that Rukeyser tried to
foster among the East Harlem youth.

If Rukeyser’s vision of the poet is that of a
valiant fighter, what is the speaker fighting for in
“Ballad”? She fights for faith—belief in language
as a system of signs that is intrinsically moral. If
the word orange can really mean grape and vice
versa, then humanity has no way to sort out right
from wrong, to recognize moral truths. Without be-
ing able to make clear moral distinctions, action
and change are impossible. Thus, the poem con-
cludes, the dilapidated neighborhood will continue
on its entropic course. With black-and-white lan-
guage distinctions muddied by the hot dog ven-
dor’s mixing of orange and grape, what is left to
stop the young ones across the street from contin-
uing on the course of deprivation, addiction, and
crime that they see around them? The threatening
atmosphere that stanza two describes—boarded-up
windows, a Cadillac sticking out of a “crummy
garage,” a menacing drug addict “who’d like to
break your back,” all contrasted with the hopeful,
vulnerable image of a woman and girl dressed in
rose and pink—is interpreted in stanza five as the
result of a paralysis in moral distinctions brought
about by indifference to language. If we can’t dis-
tinguish the orange from the grape, the purity from
the garbage, the good from the bad, “How are we

going to believe what we read and we write and

we hear and we say and we do?” Ignorant of or

indifferent to language’s meaning-making power

and, therefore, to its moral implications, the hot

dog vendor indirectly perpetuates the cycle of vi-

olence and exploitation in the neighborhood. The

last stanza creates a depressing picture of the

neighborhood’s fate illustrated through the meld-

ing of contrasting categories. In this unwholesome

place, “a deep smile” is followed by “rape.”

Rukeyser’s last word, “forever,” is a bitter one for

this poet of hope.

The question for Rukeyser is not related to her

view of language as intrinsically moral, but to her

valuation of the binary nature of language. She re-

jects the vendor’s shrug toward the difference be-

tween orange and grape as the equivalent of his dis-

missal of any binary or “two-part” system, such as

that which allows people to say eitheryes orno,

to eitheract ornot act on a community’s behalf.

While irony—a literary trend that Rukeyser bucked

for her entire career—has often been associated

with a politics of apathy, it does point toward a

more complex, multiple view of meaning in lan-

guage—a “third part” to meaning, that hovers be-

tween yes and no, either and or. In the high liter-

ary modernism of the 1940s against which

Rukeyser reacted, irony may have been largely apo-

litical, but this is not the case with the popular cul-

ture of the 1970s, a context far more relevant to the

East Harlemites of whom Rukeyser writes. Sup-

pose the vendor is not being indifferent, but ironic?

Ironic reversals in meaning are a common feature

of the vernacular of oppressed groups. In this case,

the vendor’s undermining of the distinction be-

Ballad of Orange and Grape

She has ... a belief

that the poet belongs in the

public sphere, speaking and

writing in an emphatic

voice that people can

understand and to which

they respond more

emotionally and morally

than intellectually ...”