What We Have Lost

"But he kept this knowledge of his fear thrust firmly down in him; his courage to live
depended upon how successfully his fear was hidden from his consciousness" (42).
Richard Wright's Native Son (1940)

Points for Reflection

Claude McKay's "The White House" (1922), PDF

1. what images does McKay use to convey the intensity of his narrator's suppressed emotions?
2. does the narrator find his sense of identity in expressing or in burying what he feels?
3. any idea as to why McKay appropriates and redeploys a racist description of the black man as "savage (l.6)?
4. what might the "white house" represent?
5. why configure the white house's shut door as transparent instead of opaque (l.8)?

T. S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men" (1924-25; 1925), PDF

1. in the book Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers (1965), J. Hillis Miller writes that "In 'The Hollow Men' all the richness and complexity of culture which gives [the earlier poem] 'The Waste Land' such thickness of texture disappears." In other words, the poem gives us symbols without clear referents, a series of simple images untied to particular socio-historical elements of western civilization. Take a stab at providing those referents yourself--at filling in the blanks. What elements of human experience might this enigmatic poem be most preoccupied with evoking by way of the objective correlative?
2. does this poem's pervasive tone match or move contrary to its apparent message?
3. some have suggested that this enigmatic poem is about a very particular place, time, and people: the British in post-war London. What elements of the poem suggest such particularity?
4. do other elements of this poem seem universal?
5. does the minimal punctuation confuse you, or seem appropriate?

W. H. Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts" (1938; 1940), PDF

1. does Auden configure death as central or peripheral to human awareness?
2. do you think enigmatic line six refers to imminent grandparents eagerly awaiting their first grandchild, or to the advent of Christ in Christianity? Why?
3. what is the antecedent of the pronoun "They" (l.9)?
4. do you think Auden's reading of Breughel's painting apt given what you see within the frame?
5. what has your own experience proven? Do you see a preponderance of people attuned to the suffering of others, or apathetic to it?

unnamed painting
Farrell Cockrum, Blackfoot Nation

Dr. Paul Marchbanks
pmarchba@calpoly.edu