30 Poetry for Students
goes out for a hot dog only after the day’s work is
done, this is a person who appreciates order and
worries over the disorder that brings the woman
and the little girl together in the same place as the
back-breaker and the addicts.The speaker of the poem has limits as to how
much she thinks we should, on the one hand, live
by socially stifling divisions, but also, on the other
hand, how much we ought to ignore them. Know-
ing this, it helps to step back and look at the broader
dichotomies (pairings of different things) played
out in Rukeyser’s style. For instance, the first
stanza talks about the poet in the second person, as
“you,” not as “I.” As a poetic device to make read-
ers feel involved in the poem, this technique has
limits to its effectiveness. However, it picks up
greater significance in the third stanza when the ref-
erence changes from “you” to “I.” This is the sort
of change within the poem that earned Rukeyser a
reputation for being uneven, unable to stay with the
pattern that she herself set out. It does, though, fit
the poem’s theme of sticking to labels (or not) per-
fectly. Many poems take readers to places they
have never been before, making them live new sit-
uations that are dictated to them as “you,” but this
poem, as a meditation on differences, is in its rights
to act as a meeting-place for one person’s “you”
and “I.”The poem’s title identifies it as a ballad. Tra-
ditionally, a ballad is a folk tale about the exploits
of some central character. This poem’s weary
reader-and-writer fits that profile. Since the ballad
is an ancient form, we associate it with the oppor-
tunity they give to examine exotic cultures, which
is certainly something that this ballad offers. But
while this poem starts off like many ballads, with
its main character setting off on a quest (in this
case, for a frankfurter), the quest disappears some-
where in the telling. The story disappears. It starts
with someone going somewhere, bringing readers
into their physical world, but it dissolves in the last
stanzas into a chant about opposites. At the same
time that this is happening, the rhyme scheme fal-
ters; it is undeniably bcbdbein the first three stan-
zas, but in the fourth the rhyme is worn out, match-
ing the words shape, GRAPE,and then GRAPE
again. From there on the rhymes are approximate,
at best: read / street / GRAPE, again / men / friend,
rape / hope / grape.The inconsistency from the be-
ginning of the poem to the end might be taken as
a weakness, but only by readers who are not
paying enough attention to the poem’s overall
message.I cannot say whether this harmony between
subject matter and what appears to be clumsy ex-
ecution is intentional. Since that pattern recurs time
and again in Muriel Rukeyser’s poetry, it is prob-
ably not accidental here. Regardless of how it hap-
pened, “Ballad of Orange and Grape” is doing what
it a poem is supposed to. This is a poem about see-
ing beyond form, and it has to break its form to
fully make its point. It is a poem about opposites,
and it has to introduce the vendor’s unclear think-
ing to balance out the poet’s clarity. In the end, a
poem about order needs to flirt with disorder, even
if it means that some readers might feel that the
poet is out of control.
Source:David Kelly, in an essay for Poetry for Students,
Gale, 2001.Sources
Cooper, Jane, The Life of Poetry,by Muriel Rukeyser, Paris
Press, 1996.
Daniels, Kate, Introduction to Out of Silence,by Muriel
Rukeyser, Northwestern University Press, 1997.
Gregerson, Linda, Poetry,Vol. 167, February 1996, pp. 292-
97.
Kessler, Jascha, “The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser,”
in Gramercy Review,Vol. 3, No. 4 and Vol. 4, No. 1, Au-
tumn-Winter, 1979–80, pp. 27-9.
Library Journal,May 1, 1992.
McGann, J. J., Poetry,Vol. 125, October 1974, p. 44.
Meinka, Peter, New Republic,November 24, 1973, p. 25.
Myles, Eileen, “Fear of Poetry,” in The Nation,April 14,
1997.
Publishers Weekly,March 23, 1993.
Rukeyser, Muriel, The Life of Poetry,Paris Press, 1996.
Terris, Virginia R., “Muriel Rukeyser: A Retrospective,” in
American Poetry Review,Vol. 3, No. 3, May-June, 1974,
pp. 10-15.
Ware, Michele, “’Opening the Gates’: Muriel Rukeyser and
the Poetry of Witness,” in Women’s Studies,Vol. 22, No 3,
June 1993, p. 297.For Further Study
Herzog, Anne R. and Janet E. Kaufman, eds.,“How Shall
We Tell Each Other of the Poet?”: The Life and Writing of
Muriel Rukeyser,St. Martin’s, 1999.
A compilation of essays by nearly forty prominent
poets and critics seeks to redress the neglect of
Rukeyser’s work since her death in 1980. SelectionsBallad of Orange and Grape