20 Poetry for Students

Themes.

The poem tells a simple story about the speaker

visiting a hot-dog stand in East Harlem. There the

hot-dog vendor refills two drink dispensers with the

wrong flavor beverages, putting grape in the one

marked orange, and vice versa. Rukeyser uses this

action as an example of indifference to language’s

power.

Difference

The central metaphor in the “Ballad of Orange

and Grape” is the pair of dispensers that a vendor

fills with the wrong flavor of drink. He disregards

the “unmistakable” words that mark the difference

between grape and orange, committing what the

speaker sees as a blow against language’s integrity

and, therefore, our power to use language to shape

our world in constructive ways. The basic property

that lends language its power is its ability to allow

people to make distinctions and conceptualize dif-

ferences. If people are indifferent to this power,

Rukeyser suggests, impoverished and violent so-

cial conditions, like those that pertain in the envi-

ronment she describes, will remain. If here, in the

violent and economically depressed neighborhood

where we live, we see orange drink in the machine

marked grape and vice versa, she asks, how can we

have faith in anywords that we read or write, hear

or say? How, therefore, can we make meaningful

distinctions between the terms of far more crucial

binaries, such as violence and nonviolence, war and

peace, love and hate? And how can we make sense

of the categories of difference that organize and

stratify our society, such as men and women, black

and white? Earlier in the poem, Rukeyser obliquely

raises the issues of racial and gender difference in

relation to the bleak conditions of the neighbor-

hood. She also refers to the presence of violence in

the lines “a man who’d like to break your back,”

“rape,” and “a hot street of murder.” She argues

that respecting the difference between orange and

grape is one step toward shaping reality and chang-

ing its ills and inequities.

Language and Meaning

Rukeyser sees language, properly used, as an

important tool for understanding reality and also

for shaping it and effecting change. The poem’s

speaker rails against the hot-dog vendor for his in-

difference toward the meaning of the words

“grape” and “orange.” Such indifference toward

language’s meaning has huge repercussions for

Rukeyser. In stanzas five and six she describes how

such indifference erodes everyday people’s faith in

language (she speaks as part of a collective “we”)

as an accurate reflection of the larger world’s real-

ity. “How can we go on reading / and make sense

of what we read?” the speaker asks. “How can they

write and believe what they’re writing, / the young

ones across the street?” If people see that, in its

everyday use, orange really means grape, and vice

versa, then maybe love really means hate and war

really means peace. For Rukeyser such reversals

undermine language’s power as an instrument of

political change. She goes on to claim that the in-

tegrity of language’s meaning is necessary not only

for knowledge, but also for the action that brings

about change, “what we do and what we don’t do.”

In the last stanza, she uses a list of nouns to de-

scribe the disorganized, powerless, and therefore

nearly hopeless atmosphere of the East Harlem

Ballad of Orange and Grape

Topics for

Further

Study

• Why do you think Rukeyser starts the poem in
  a second-person voice and then shifts to the first-
  person?


• How are the rhymes important to the overall
  meaning of the poem? Why does Rukeyser
  choose not to rhyme certain lines?


• Do you think that it is true, as a general rule,
  that one should aim to accurately reflect reality
  when writing or speaking? Describe an instance
  when it is especially crucial to do so. Or describe
  an example of when playing with or distorting
  words’ meaning is worthwhile or valid.


• Do some research to find out what the daily con-
  ditions of life were like for people living in East
  Harlem in the period when Rukeyser wrote.
  How effective a statement is the poem about
  these conditions?


• Idenitify the various political causes and move-
  ments with which Rukeyser was affiliated.
  Choose one that seems appropriate, research it,
  and explore how its tenets relate to the themes
  of “Ballad of Orange and Grape.”