I should like it to be the attitude
of my great- great- grandmother,
legendary devotee of the arts,
who having eight children
and little opportunity for painting pictures,
Wright's poems rarely deal with concerns of gender in an explicit way, but here she alludes to the situation most women found themselves in: possessive of a passion but, due to the constraints of being a wife and mother, which society expects if not demands of them, unable to devote much time to that passion. The woman in the poem loves the arts and considers herself a painter, but she has eight children and has no time for her art. Thus, even though we might wonder at her putative callousness in drawing a picture when one of her children is at death's door, her momentary ability to be an artist is a pleasure hard to deny.
Oh, they slide and they vanish
as he shuffles the years like a pack of conjuror's cards.
Wright suggests that as a person gets older, they realize the value of their days more than in their youth. Age can be a frightening thing, as it comes fast and can not be turned backwards. In this line, years are described as something that slides and vanishes, because they are simply too "slippery" to grasp. Looking back, everything seems to blur into "the past", which is mixed haphazardly like a deck of cards. Truth and fiction blur together, and it is not the content of the story that seems to matter as much as its telling.
The walls draw in to the warmth
and the old roof cracks its joints;
At first, this line may seem insignificant, albeit a vivid use of personification, but it is just one of many lines of a poem littered with figurative language. In this case, the old roof is the old man, "cracking his joints" in age, and the walls are like his stories that he "clutches round his bones." Dan is a creaking, battered creature just like the cottage, whose stories that might be "True or not" are just as incapable of accurately portraying history and honoring memory as the walls are of providing warmth and comfort.
They did not breed nor love,
each in his cell alone
cried as the wind now cries
through this flute of stone.
The narrator of this poem is ruminating on a windy, isolated stone prison, which seems just as lonely and abandoned as it was when it was full of convicts. Loneliness can easily drive a person insane, and it is easy to interpret the personified cries of the wind to the cries of prisoners that were once there. Separated from their homes and families, they were all alone, like the prison itself is now—a haunted memorial to trauma and despair.
Their greed is brief; their joy is long.
Wright's bird poems, like "Magpies," often use human traits and behaviors to describe the birds in question; this humanizes the creatures and makes us feel an affinity with them. Another reason why this similarity is important is that, as seen in the quoted line, it is intended to help us learn from the birds. Since Wright has already described them as "gentlemen" and helped us see the magpies as similar to us, we are primed to come to this this line with its message of jettisoning greed and indulging in the beauty and joy of life and feel it resonate with us. We ought to learn from the birds, we think; their life lessons apply to us too.
Mountains jumped in his way,
rocks rolled down on him,
and the old crow cried, You'll soon be dead.
Wright personifies elements of nature such as the mountains, rocks, and the bird in order to show that while the boy might initially think nature is simply an inert, passive force he can intimidate with his gun and his attitude, it is actually full of power and presence and can dominate even the most tenacious person. The boy learns this lesson, and works with nature by the end of the poem. This is a lesson Wright wishes to impart on readers ignorant or callous enough to think they hold sway over the natural world.
as thread for that weaver,
whose web within me growing
follows beyond my knowing
some pattern sprung from nothing-
The poet uses the metaphor of a weaver to show how her five senses come together. A weaver takes different strands and entwines them to create the whole; the textile that results is a singular piece comprised of thousands of individual threads. Similarly, for the poet her senses entwine and enmesh and the result is a new and wondrous "rhythm."
O take from me
the weight and waterfall ceaseless Time
that batters down my weakness;
The metho drinker feels overwhelmed by what he deems the "waterfall" of Time, and desires the alcohol to take that "weight" away. He wants oblivion; he does not want to be moored in the present, to consider the past, or to hope for the future. Wright's metaphor is effective because the reader can easily picture a rushing, cacophonous, unceasing waterfall; by being able to do that, the oppressiveness of Time for the man is clear.
yet he is uneasy under her kiss
and winces from that acid of her desire.
In order to conjure the absolutely consuming nature of addiction, Wright uses the metaphor of desire of the flesh. The metho drinker is a man, and he perceives his addiction as a "white and burning girl" and a "woman of fire." He desires her intensely, but begins to feel "uneasy" and "winces" from her. It is clear that while he wants her, he simultaneously wishes he did not; the sensation is uncomfortable, embittering, and conducive to regret and lament. Thus, by using this metaphor Wright is able to make the intensity of addiction's clutches more understandable to people who do not feel it themselves.
Up came the night ready to swallow him,
like the barrel of a gun,
like an old black hat,
like a black dog hungry to follow him.
When the boy begins his journey, the gun, the hat, and the dog are his. They represent his power and form the source of his boldness; they are his tools to dominate. Yet in this stanza we see that things have changed. He cannot rely on his former tools, and now the night that is coming "to swallow him" is compared to those very tools. Nature will not be cowed by the boy, and the realization of this fact helps the boy start to change his mindset.
