Self-Check 5
1. On Sunday the father could have slept late, because he wasn’t obligated to work, but he got up anyway to take care of the fire and keep his family warm. 2. The boy has two pairs of shoes, work shoes and good shoes. He’ll wear the good shoes for Sunday church service later that day. 3. The increasing power of the images suggests that mounting frustration over social and legal inequality may eventually explode into violence. 4. The poem expresses quite clearly what will happen to the young people who cut school, play pool, drink bathtub gin, and party all the time. It doesn’t say these activities are desirable. Instead, it shows what will happen to people who behave this way. 5. These lines suggest that the speaker is a rural farm laborer, perhaps in the Deep South. 6. The break in rhythm occurs in line 27, “So. But the hand was gone already.” The break symbolizes the abrupt end of the boy’s life. 7. The speaker feels that war is terrible, filled with horrors of pain and suffering, and that to tell a young man that it’s “sweet and befitting to die for one’s country” is a terrible lie. It’s a lie told only by people who haven’t seen a real battle. 8. Metaphor: “the moon swung bare on its black cord over the house.”