Volume 10 21
neighborhood. Its denizens are hampered from
drawing meaningful distinctions by a disregard to
language and its power as represented by the man
pouring orange into grape and grape into orange
“forever.”
Order vs. Disorder
Order and disorder are often important ideas
in poems with irregular rhyme and meter schemes,
like the “Ballad of Orange and Grape.” Rukeyser,
who most often wrote in free verse (poetry that is
not strictly structured), uses a fairly structured form
of seven stanzas of seven lines each. The lines are
in rhyming pairs, except for the longer, extra sev-
enth line in each stanza that breaks the pattern,
sounding irregular. This introduces an element of
disorder. The poem’s structure is, of course, inte-
grally related to its content. Indeed, one of the
poem’s important themes relates the social disor-
der in East Harlem to the disorder or confusion be-
tween binary terms in language. When the vendor
pours the wrong flavor drink into the two drink dis-
pensers, he undermines language by breaking its
order. The drinks are, one might say, disorganized.
Rukeyser attributes great significance to this, using
it as an example: once language’s categories are vi-
olated, meaning is undermined and action and
change are impossible. The poem’s last stanza is
its loosest, in terms of both grammar and rhyme. It
takes the form of a list of varied but disorganized
images. This stanza illustrates the disorder of a so-
cial world that has no faith in language and the
paralysis that comes with it.
Style.
As identified in its title, Rukeyser’s “Ballad of Or-
ange and Grape” takes its form from the musical
and literary genre of the ballad. Arising in the late
Middle Ages, ballads were originally short folk
songs telling concise stories. The literary ballad,
growing out of the musical form, borrows certain
stylistic elements from song. For example, they of-
ten tell emotionally charged stories and repeat sig-
nificant words or lines. Early literary ballads em-
ployed a specific form—four-line stanzas with
iambic lines of seven accents in rhymed pairs
(abcb, defe,etc.) In the twentieth century, with the
growing domination of free verse, these formal fea-
tures of literary ballads became less important.
However, many modern ballads still employ some
pattern of rhyme and repetition, in keeping with the
form’s musical roots. Most ballads bear some re-
semblance to songs, and songwriters continue to
employ the ballad form often as well.
“Ballad of Orange and Grape” is a typical
modern ballad. It tells a short, compact story in
verse form. Playing on the ballad’s history of emo-
tionally heightened narrative, the poem takes a
seemingly mundane event—visiting a hot-dog
stand—and places it as the center of the story, and
endows it with great significance. While Rukeyser
is known mostly as a free-verse poet, this poem has
a clear structure and rhyme scheme that bears some
relation to the ballad’s heritage through its use of
rhymed pairs. There are seven stanzas of seven
lines in “Ballad of Orange and Grape”, with the
first six lines in rhymed pairs and with the last, non-
rhyming line unpaired and longer than the rest
(abcbdbe). The last line in each stanza stands out
to the ear for this reason and suggests a contrast or
shift. Though Rukeyser does not repeat any line at
regular intervals, as in a traditional ballad, she does
repeat phrases that describe the central action of the
man pouring grape into orange and orange into
grape in the fourth and seventh stanzas.Historical Context.
Idealism and Apathy in the 1970s
Critic Jascha Kessler stated that reading
Rukeyser’s Collected Poemsis “like rereading the
last forty years, not in terms of the arts or even his-
tory, but in terms of the events and issues that are
most typical of the times.” “Ballad of Orange and
Grape” reflects the integrative sense of historical
time for which Rukeyser is known, offering a rep-
resentative event that reflects the larger spirit of the
historical moment.
The poem is set in time generally, “in the twen-
tieth century,” suggesting that the poet’s concern
for language is not tied to a particular decade or
period, but to the shifts represented by the whole
century. However, the social and political climate
at the particular time Rukeyser wrote doubtless
shaped the vision of lost faith that she puts forth in
the poem. When the poem was published in 1973,
the legacy of the liberalizing political movements
of 1960s continued, but with their idealism severely
hampered in the wake of the assassinations of John
F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King,
and Malcolm X. The politically active set of which
Rukeyser was part struggled on, but with consid-
erably less optimism than they had had in the yearsBallad of Orange and Grape