Portrait (Symbol - "Enlightenment")
In "Enlightenment," Trethewey opens the poem with a description of a portrait of Thomas Jefferson. She describes the way in which his forehead is lit brightly, but the rest of his figure is shadowed. She suggests that the darkness and light in the painting highlight the contrast between Jefferson's "bright knowledge" and the "dark subtext" of his personal life. In this context, the portrait symbolizes the central tension of Jefferson's biography: his intellectual elevation of freedom in direct conflict with his ownership of slaves.
Darkness (Symbol - "Myth")
In the poem "Myth," darkness functions as a symbol of Orpheus's inability to hold onto Eurydice. In the poem he mentions the "Erebus" that he holds Eurydice in each night, referring to the dreamscape where he can be with her in his mind. Still, each morning she slips away from him at some indeterminate moment between his sleep and waking. The darkness represents the nebulous space of his dreams, showing how he can only be with her in this imagined setting.
Domesticity (Motif - "Housekeeping")
The motif of domesticity is featured prominently in the poem "Housekeeping." The speaker describes the daily housework she does alongside her mother. She details the care they put into the preservation of small things, like broken chair legs and torn shirts. At the conclusion of the poem, she depicts the end of the day, as she looks through a catalog and her mother irons. By placing attention on these usually unseen moments, Trethewey imbues them with importance. She shows the lives these women lead and all of the effort they put into running a household each day. As a whole, she uses the motif of domesticity to show the sum total of all the work these women do, highlighting its meaning and difficulty.
Letters (Symbol - "Native Guard")
In the middle section of "Native Guard," the speaker of the poem, a Black soldier in the Louisiana Native Guard, describes his efforts to help Confederate prisoners write letters to their families. He does so because he is literate and many of them are not. In great detail, he depicts their struggle to find the right words in these letters. He notes the significant gap between the sentiment they are trying to express and how it comes out on the page. Within the narrative of this section, these letters symbolize the limits of written language, as the soldiers are ultimately unable to put all of their emotions into this correspondence.
Whiteness (Motif - "Letters from Storyville")
In "Letters from Storyville," a section within Bellocq's Ophelia, the speaker of the poem frequently remarks on the motif of whiteness. The speaker is a mixed-race prostitute working in New Orleans' red light district at the turn of the 19th century. In an effort to appear paler, she ingests harmful arsenic tablets. Elsewhere in the poem, she describes the different people in her life who have tried to make her emphasize her whiteness in society. In the poem, the motif of whiteness appears to show how the speaker has been pushed to form her identity around a constructed racial ideal.
