18 pages • 36 minutes read
Robert PinskyThe Street
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context
Pinsky is quoted as saying, “My work often skitters or jumps or sometimes somersaults from autobiographical material to historical material” (Ehrlich, Lara. "Robert Pinsky: America's Poet." Arts & Sciences, 2017). “The Street” is emblematic of this tendency. The beginning alludes to class struggles, juxtaposing the work of the "Wainwrights" (Line 5), or wagonmakers, and other working-class people with the “Emperor[’s]” (Line 7) needs for a luxurious funeral for his child, before focusing on an anecdote, presumably from Pinsky's own childhood.
Many of Pinsky’s other poems make use of this kind of leap from the political to the personal. In his famous poem, “The Shirt,” the speaker discusses the shirt he is wearing as a jumping-off point from which he examines the world economic structure and history of making shirts in the industrial age. Though starting with a small object, Pinsky eventually tells the story of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, in which 146 workers were immolated or jumped to their deaths. In his book-length poem, “An Explanation of America,” the speaker addresses his eight-year-old daughter on the subject of the country.
The interest of America as a topic has made some critics call Pinsky the voice of America. Outside of the poems themselves, Pinsky believes reading poetry together can help create a sense of shared cultural identity. Much the way the eponymous street binds people together, reading poetry together can help people feel they are bound or connected with a common thread. This belief is reflected in “The Favorite Poem Project,” where people from across the United States were invited to read aloud their favorite poems.
This project reveals another of Pinsky’s values in poetry—the use of sound and music. In his poem “Meaning,” he explores how illusive meaning can be. Pinsky said in interviews that poetry is not meant solely to be clever but also to bring pleasure; the sounds themselves should create music. Readers can see this in “The Street,” which makes use of multiple sound devices to create a poem that is interesting to hear as well as understand. The continued use of alliteration (when closely connected words share the same beginning letter or sound), consonance (the repetition of consonant sounds), and assonance (the repetition of vowel sounds) make the poem “flow” and create resonate sounds that elevate the story to the level of music.
Socio-Historical Context: Ivanhoe and Race
“Ivanhoe / Was about race” (Lines 52-53), the speaker of “The Street” declares. Ivanhoe’s story, written by Sir Walter Scott, mimics some of the themes Pinsky explores in his work. As a Scotsman in the early 1800s, Scott felt discrimination from the English. Ivanhoe is a historical fiction set in medieval England that calls attention to the divisions between the Saxon and Norman ethnic groups and religious sects of Christians and Jews. The Normans held power over the Saxons, and the Christians held power over the Jews. In Ivanhoe, the Knight Wilfred of Ivanhoe has a falling out with his father because he, a Saxon, supports the King of England, Norman Richard the Lionheart. The story explores how the Saxon and Norman forge alliances, creating a more unified England and a national identity that binds up both Saxons and Normans, Christians and Jews. The book is, as Pinsky says, about race.
In the same way Scott uses Ivanhoe to discuss race in England, Pinsky uses it to explore race in America. Pinsky grew up in a neighborhood of diverse ethnicities. His family and his neighbors were all working-class Americans, comprising a community together. Like Ivanhoe, Pinsky believes that people with differing backgrounds can forge a common national identity. He manifests this belief in projects like the “Favorite Poem Project.” In “The Street,” the metaphor of the vine makes it clear that all the people of different backgrounds, living in different time periods, are nonetheless bound together in “the thick / Vine of the world” (Lines 1-2).
The poem begins with a reference to an older time, outside of America, a place where there is an emperor, and a dead child’s eyes are decorated with kohl. It ends with the modern people thinking about the “scales of the dead” (Line 61), who are judging them and predict that those who currently live will one day die too. This expands the scope of the poem, insinuating that all people, no matter where or when they live, share a common connection: All are mortal, and all will be judged by the “scales of the dead” (Line 61). This is a principle that unifies people, surmounting the differences of religion, race, or ethnicity.
