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.
Symbols & Motifs
The Vine
The overarching metaphor of “The Street” is the “thick / Vine,” which Pinsky says is covered in “red nervelets / Coiled at its tips” (Lines 2-3). A vine connotes both growth and connection. The main vine supports multiple flowers and leaves and spreads as it grows. The “red nervelets” (Line 2) suggest blossoms of flowers that represent individual people and their lives, connected to and fed by the vine.
The flower metaphor is complicated by Pinsky’s diction, comparing the people bound together as “Blisters on the vine” (Line 14). The people who live and work together, including the man who loses his wife to a wealthier lover, are “All riding the vegetable wave of the street” (Line 46). This suggests that the flowers on the vine are bound together in their mutual sorrow and helplessness. They are carried along with the vine as it grows, but they have no control over where it goes, or who it brings with it.
Dragon
Pinsky compares the street to a vine, but he deviates from that comparison in the following passage:
Each August. As the powerful dragonlike
Hump swelled he rose cursing and ready
To throw his shoe—woven
Angular as a twig into the fabulous
Rug or brocade with crowns and camels,
Leopards and rosettes, (Lines 40-45).
The speaker creates a simile inside the metaphor of the vine, comparing the street and the vine to a dragon whose “hump swelled” (Line 41) while the person riding it curses. The verb choice of "swelled" (Line 41) creates an image of exaggerated movement. The "dragonlike" (Line 40) street grows large, causing the man on its back to rise quickly. A reader might interpret this as the rising and falling of fortune.
Those who ride the dragon must contend with changes of circumstance that are unpredictable, caused by a monster who has no concern for the person riding its back. This emphasizes how unstable the lives of the masses are. Those on the street do not become masters of the dragon but merely riders, learning how to stay on as the monster moves under them.
Scales
Throughout history, different religions and cultures have used scales to represent justice, or judgment, at the end of a person’s life. In ancient Egypt, the god Anubis weighs a person’s heart against a feather to determine how light and innocent the heart is after death. In Christianity, it is the archangel Michael who weighs the heart for similar purposes.
The scales in “The Street” also represent judgment; however, they are the “Silver scales of the dead” (Line 61), meaning that it is history, ancestors, memories, and society who make their judgments of people who live on or along the street. Pinsky writes that these scales “[loom]” (Line 61) on a street that is living, moving, and shifting under the feet of its residents. It suggests that the people are aware that they are being judged and possibly that they are judging themselves or feeling the judgment of their neighbors as they try to navigate a life that feels out of their control. It emphasizes the perilous, unpredictable quality of life for the residents, and for all living people who are caught in the flow of history.
