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Orchard of the strangest fruits
Hanging from the skies;
Brothers, yet insensate brutes
Who fear each others’ eyes.
One man stands as free men stand
As if his soul might be
Brave, unbroken; see his hand
Nailed to an oaken tree.
She came up to meet him
In a smooth golden cloak,
She choked him and beat him
To death, for a joke.
Her bright locks were tangled,
She shouted for joy,
With one hand she strangled
A strong little boy.
Now in silence she lingers
Beside him all night
To wash her long fingers
In silvery light.
The old moon is tarnished
With smoke of the flood,
The dead leaves are varnished
With colour like blood,
A treacherous smiler
With teeth white as milk,
A savage beguiler
In sheathings of silk,
The sea creeps to pillage,
She leaps on her prey;
A child of the village
Was murdered today.
The rain’s cold grains are silver-gray
Sharp as golden sands,
A bell is clanging, people sway
Hanging by their hands.
Supple hands, or gnarled and stiff,
Snatch and catch and grope;
That face is yellow-pale, as if
The fellow swung from rope.
Dull like pebbles, sharp like knives,
Glances strike and glare,
Fingers tangle, Bluebeard’s wives
Dangle by the hair.
Wylie wrote this poem as if the character was sitting on the beach watching the sea and a little boy. Wylie starts out with the visual of a smoke-tarnished moon and dead leaves with the color of blood. She personifies the sea as a murderous female and making the little boy the victim of the crime she committed. She explains his painful and harsh death and how selfish the sea was, keeping her prey to herself, and shielding it from anything else.
There is also irony in the title. A lullaby is supposed to comfort a child and help them go to sleep, however, in this poem the child is in danger and is "put to sleep eternally."
Irony: Both the sea and the moon are mentioned as females and females are normally thought to be motherly but in this poem both the moon and the sea are disgusting and vengeful
In this poem, Wylie is simply explaining the people within a trolley car. She uses a lot of morbid imagery and allusions. There is an expressed dissatisfaction with the realities of life which was a huge theme in many of the poems written in the book, Nets to Catch the Wind, which contained A Crowded Trolley Car.
Allusion to Bluebeards wives: tale about a man who secretly killed all his wives and hung them up in a locked room. When his new wife discovered what was in that room, she revealed her husband's atrocities to her sister and brothers, who killed Bluebeard.
Dungy, Camille. "A Crowded Trolley Car." <i>Poetry Foundation</i>. Poetry Foundation, n.d.
Web. 10 June 2014. <http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/175338>.
""Sea Lullaby" by Elinor Wylie." <i>"Sea Lullaby" by Elinor Wylie</i>. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 June
2014. <http://www.poemtree.com/poems/SeaLullaby.htm>.
Dungy, Camille. "Elinor Wylie." <i>Poetry Foundation</i>. Poetry Foundation, n.d. Web. 10 June 2014. <http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/elinor-wylie>.