Again, The Fields
After first read of “Again, the Fields”, I was slightly confused about the various references to a wheat field. The first reference is in the short quotation above the poem, assumably by Winslow Homer. “The dead they lay long the lines like sheaves of Wheat.”(31) In the poem itself, Tretheway states, “The wheat falls beneath his scythe-” (31) The reason this was somewhat confusing to me is because all the “fields” mentioned in other poems in the collection are cotton fields. Also, the end of “Again, the Fields” the poem mentions cotton fields. “as if toward a distant field-the white canvas where sky and cotton meet.” Unable to figure out the real meaning of the poem, I did some digging about the Winslow Homer quotation. I ended up with this, http://www.winslow-homer.com/The-Veteran-in-a-New-Field.html
Reading the poem with this painting as the backdrop gave the poem new life for me. The loneliness of the worker among the seemingly endless fields is representative of the feelings of slaves working in cotton fields. The work hard, and there was no end in sight. After the war ended, the earth was “soaked..red as the wine of sacrament”, and the veterans return back to the fields. While the worker in the painting is white, and the crop is wheat, Tretheway uses this as a symbol for post-war slaves re-entering the cotton fields. A second interpretation is that Tretheway is showing the contrast of the painting to the post-war south. In the painting, the endless golden wheat fields could be represevtative of bounty and success. However, if the crop is switched to cotton, and the worker’s skin is switched to “the color of dark soil”, the message changes completely.
2 comments
Who are the ‘dead’ in homer’s quotation?
If you’d known about the notes in the text before you wrote this, Bobby, you would have noticed that the epigraph to the poem doesn’t come from Homer. Instead, when a poet writes “After” someone at the beginning of the poem, it is there to signify a text that was an important reference. In Trethewey’s case, she writes a poem that is a description (ekphrasis) of a painting, although she moves someplace else at the end of the poem. I think that Trethewey is wanting us to notice the absence of the black worker in a painting like this, and her poem provides the antidote to this absence.
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