Marginalia

The difference between “pleasure” and “Pain” show how a day can change for the worst. A workers drive in the morning can be gone after the days hard work. By noon they can be worn down.

The word “endless” makes these workers lives feel like a cycle of never ending work. Even when they finish something, another thing will take its place that they need to do. This shows how the working life can be […]

Annotation for lines 239-246 – Connection  Collier’s ending here connects directly to Duck’s poem. Both Collier and Duck describe how unfair the labour is and how workers are trapped in an endless cycle with […]

Annotations for lines 137-142 These lines brought forward a question that was burning in my mind while reading this poem. If women must work tirelessly while remaining cheerful, is their strength and work truly […]

Annotation for lines 43-48 Collier directly challenges the belief that women are incapable of hard physical work. These lines make this part of the poem so interesting to me. It both defends women while […]

Here Collier shows that the women don’t even get the respite of sleep that the men do when they come home from work, they have to do household chores and take care of the children.

Where Duck explained the men decending on the field like warriors on a battlefield, Collier takes a different approach by describing the harsh reality of going to work attached to your baby and coming home from […]

As Duck was comparing the threshers job to the Shepards easy job, Collier compares the role of the man to that of a woman, showing that women have hard work to do too, and they get paid even worse for it.

The final stanza just reinforces the idea that the laborers work never ends and they get no real rest from it.

Intros section it seems like Duck is making the workers descending on the field like heroes into battle, giving it the feeling of an epic poem.

It looks like here Duck is drawing a contrast between the work the Shepards do and the work that threshers do, making the Shepards job seem laid back and enjoyable with, “tell a merry tale” and “tune his voice and sing”

While Duck tries to pin genders against each other in his poem, Collier illustrates that everyone in the working class are equal in the eyes of the “sordid owners” (245) as slaves and dollar signs. Though either […]

Collier is referring to the unspoken expectations of women, an issue that is still prevalent today with issues around maternity leave and decreased pay rates. Women are never finished with work, despite leaving […]

Collier is referring to the difference in gender roles and expectations that are narrowly viewed through the male lens in Duck’s poem. Duck states, “Ah! were their hands so active as their tongues, / How nimbly […]

While the muse typically helps to inspire the artist, Duck is using the muse as a form of PTSD towards the fieldwork, taunting them in their dreams with visions of the work they are suffering through during the […]

Duck uses anaphora again, but to reveal the conflict of his efforts in remedying the pain he has suffered through the back breaking labour. The rhyming begins to fall apart too with lines ending in “get” (139) and […]

Duck is using anaphora to relate the necessity of man in providing for others, especially women, who as Duck refers later, are like birds who do better at chatting than working. Duck is establishing gender roles […]

Annotations for lines 276-281 I sense some irony and criticism in these lines. While the master invited the workers to feast with him, it feels like there is some mockery when the narrator says that “he, too […]

Annotations for lines 137-142 The use of repetition in these lines helps readers to understand what kind of sustenance is served to those working. This also helps to show that no matter how much (which isn’t […]

Annotation for lines43-48 The imagery in these lines helps the reader visualize the labor conditions people were forced to endure during this time. In line 43, “briny streams our sweat descends” is a vivid […]