Volume 10 27
that nothing is as it seems. The poem asks, “How
are we going to believe what we read and we write
and we hear and we say and we do?” Ultimately,
“Ballad of Orange and Grape” leads readers not to
the horrifying loss of meaning but to the possibil-
ity of things. She leads readers to make connec-
tions, at once horrifying and inspiring, in “Ballad
of Orange and Grape.”
“Ballad of Orange and Grape” requires the
reader to encounter the rhythm of the ballad as it
sweeps into a landscape of opposites. Rukeyser,
who preferred writing in long, free-flowing, un-
rhymed verse, uses the ballad form, rhymed every
other line, to create a feeling of walking. The nar-
rator is going down the street after a day of work.
It is the “twentieth century.” These statements of
setting in the first stanza place the reader in a time
that is moving forward. The reader is “you,” a col-
lective you, a fellow witness. At the second stanza’s
“windows boarded up” the reader is already into
another moment of the century, propelled by the
rhythm of the text, which is a rhythm of discovery
as the reader sees the windows, then the rats, the
garage, and the Cadillac. The reader makes a steady
path through the words and down the street, riding
through the neighborhood as it reveals a raft of op-
posites: a rundown building and a Cadillac, an omi-
nous “man who’d like to break your back” and a
serene woman and child. There are things to be
scared about and things to respect and desire.
In The Life of Poetry,Rukeyser wrote, “Out-
rage and possibility are in all the poems we know.”
The poem suggests that these opposing forces, out-
rage and possibility, are life itself. The words si-
multaneously travel the street of poverty, drug ad-
diction, and violence and the possibility of beauty
in children and future hope. The poem pushes the
reader to confront and unravel opposing systems,
or binaries, in a way that is not always natural or
comfortable. Opposing forces within consciousness
are also revealed and confronted, as the reader
wrestles with the poem. He or she walks along and
discovers that words in connection with their mean-
ings are infinitely complex.
The shock of complexity stops the poem in its
tracks. The rhythm continues in the third stanza
with “Frankfurter frankfurter,” but the repetition
slows the thought. The emphasis implies uncer-
tainty, as if asking, what is this name? What is a
frankfurter?The ballad pushes the reader forward
to the orange and grape soda machines, which are
both empty. The reader will discover shortly that
the words are also empty. They hold no meaning
except that given to them through social construct.
Orange soda is only made orange after it’s given
the name orange. Before that it could just as well
be purple or blue or pink.
The “I” in the poem faces the hot dog man “in
between” the two machines. The “I” is an “eye,”
seeing the emptiness of words, seeing words as
containers for meaning for the first time and stuck
between what is known and familiar and what is
unknown and utterly mysterious. These words, and
by default all words, are empty, just as the soda
machines are empty.
The soda man fills the emptiness and propels
the poem forward again, only to have it run circles
around the words orange and grape. The wheels
spin as he pours “in the familiar shape.” The words
are familiar to the witness. Orange is orange and
grape is grape, yet the man pours the opposites into
one another. He pours “the grape drink into the one
marked ORANGE and orange drink into the one
marked GRAPE.” Perceptions fall apart. Even with
the words grape and orange, “large and clear, un-
mistakable,” the familiar becomes convoluted.
Jane Cooper, a critic and scholar of Rukeyser’s
work, wrote in the introduction to The Life of Po-
etrythat Rukeyser, “liked to say that poems are
meeting-places, and certainly as one composes a
poem there is a sense of seeing farther than usual
into the connection of things, and then of bringing
intense pressure to bear on those connections, un-
til they rise into full consciousness for oneself and
others.” The road to consciousness in the poem is
accepting that orange has just been poured into
grape and grape has just been poured into orange;
for all the reader knows, this is the way it is really
supposed to be. This is the moment of enlighten-
ment, the moment when a horrifying truth is re-
vealed: meanings do not mean in the ways the wit-
ness believed. The meanings themselves are empty.
The witness, the “I,” enters the poem to res-
cue meaning, grasp after it, and question how a so-Ballad of Orange and GrapeWhat is orange
exactly, and, more deeply,
what does it mean and how
did it get that way?”