You’ll be reading all the poems from Hughes in the anthology, and three by Stevens. Here are a few explanatory notes and some suggested study questions.

Notes and Queries on Langston Hughes

“Aunt Sue’s Stories,” “Dream Variations,” “Tambourines” (pages 231-33)

Whose voice is speaking in each of these poems? Are they the same voice? Are there words it would be difficult to imagine being spoken? If so, Hughes must take us beyond the voice—but to where?

“The Weary Blues” (pages 233-34)

Scan the lines of the poem for meter. How do they fit a familiar metrical system? How do they not fit?

4. “Lenox Avenue”: a major street in Harlem

“Sylvester’s Dying Bed” (pages 234-35)

What is the relationship of the title of this poem to its verses?

“Cross” (page 245)

What multiple meanings are conveyed by this title?

“Madam’s Past History” (pages 249-50)

15. “WPA”: the Works Progress Administration, one of the New Deal programs which provided jobs for the unemployed

“Harlem” (page 257)

Why would Hughes phrase all of the explosive comments in this poem in the form of questions, and put the only tentative idea in the form of an assertion?

Notes and Queries on Wallace Stevens

These notes may be helpful to you on a second or third reading. While the difficulties Stevens’s poems present may tempt you to look to these notes right away, it would be worth first reading them through at least once, without notes and (ideally) aloud, for the sheer enjoyment of the magical sounds of the poems.

“Sunday Morning” (pages 117-21)

I. 1. peignoir: a light bathrobe

3. cockatoo: “green freedom” may allude to the green crown atop this white bird’s head

5. “ancient sacrifice”: What do you think Stevens is referring to here?

I. 14-15. Palestine contains the sepulchre, or tomb, of Christ. But it is also described as a place of “blood”—why?

II. 7. How is the meter of this line different from those dominant elsewhere in this poem?

III. 1. “Jove”: Also known as Jupiter, or Zeus. In the myth, he was born to a Titan goddess named Rhea, but was nursed on the island of Crete by a goat.

III. 5. “hinds”: shepherds

IV. 1. We now know that there are at least two voices in this poem. What argument does the speaker make? What argument does the woman make (or stand for)? How could we characterize these voices—hopeful, assertive, anxious, what?

IV. 1-5. The woman’s first lines are extraordinary, but what do they mean?

IV. 7. “chimera”: an imaginary monster

V. 15. “disregarded plate”: Stevens commented in a letter, “Plate is used in the sense of so-called family plate [that is, household silver]. Disregarded refers to the disuse into which things fall that have been possessed for a long time. I mean, therefore, that death releases and renews. What the old have come to disregard, the young inherit and make use of.”

VI. 1. Is this question a rhetorical one?

VII. 1-5. How might the activity of this “ring of men” represent an alternative to Christianity?

VII. 10. “serafin”: the Seraphim, or angels guarding the throne of the Lord

VII. 15. In its first published version, the poem ended with this line. What difference might such an ending have made for the poem’s thematic emphasis?

VIII. 7. “unsponsored”: one of the most puzzling words in the poem. Who is the sponsor we humans no longer have? Could it be Christ? someone or something else?

“Anecdote of the Jar” (page 122)

Why might it be important that the jar is “round”? And why does Stevens repeat this detail in a line whose rhyme circles back onto itself: “The jar was round upon the ground”? How might this poem be a reflection on the Romantic theme of the encounter between the human consciousness and nature?

“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” (pages 125-27)

This poem features the prominent use of what we could call “external form”: the words appear to be pressed into a highly visible scheme whose relationship to the meaning of the poem seems arbitrary. Why thirteen, for example? Does the unevenness of the stanzas seem motivated, or did the lines just happen to come out that way? The poem’s obvious irregularity of form leads us to ask these questions.

Stevens once wrote, “This group of poems is not meant to be a collection of epigrams or of ideas, but of sensations.” Bearing that statement in mind, it’s worth considering that these poems might not all involve looking at a blackbird, but also possibly through its vision to its perceptions.

I. Notice that the poem begins by counting something. Why does the blackbird stand between a human observer and a quiet snow-covered backdrop?

VI. 2. “barbaric glass”: why barbaric? For a clue, note the relationship of this stanza to stanza XI.

VII. 1. “Haddam”: an actual town in Connecticut. Stevens wrote in a letter: “The thin men of Haddam are entirely fictitious although some years ago one of the citizens of that place wrote to me to ask what I had in mind. I just like the name. It is an old whaling town, I believe. In any case, it has a completely Yankee sound.” Why would Stevens pick a name that seemed to him characteristically “Yankee”? What does he imagine the men of Haddam are like?

VIII. In what sense might language be said to come between the human mind and the knowledge we can have about nature?

X. 3. “bawds of euphony”: Stevens wrote, “What was intended by X was that the bawds of euphony would suddenly cease to be academic and express themselves sharply: naturally, with pleasure, etc.”

XI. 5. “equipage”: the coach.