The Street

“The Street” presents an image of working-class America that is troubled by cyclical neglect, misuse, and abuse by the wealthy elite. The speaker presents his own street, Rockwell Avenue (Line 16), in the context of a larger history, stretching back to the days of emperors. It projects into a future where all will be judged by the dead, suggesting the place is part of a larger cycle of a society that builds its wealth and power on the backs of the poor, specifically the immigrants and those who work with their hands.

The poem begins with the concept of a street in general, not the speaker’s street in particular. The first descriptors of the street are “Streaked and fretted with effort” (Line 1), demonstrating a place that is not clean but rather carries the proof of work that common people have done. They have dirtied it with their effort, rather than cleaning it or improving it. Though it might be “Streaked” (Line 1) with effort, it is necessary, and “All roads lead from it” (Line 4).

The emperor, preparing for the funeral of his "favorite" (Line 7) child, is dependent on the street for creating a parade funeral. He forces the "Wainwrights and upholsterers" (Line 5) to work all night to prepare for the service procession of his beloved.

The poem shifts into a depiction of the speaker’s street, Rockwell Avenue. This is an updated version of the street of the emperor. The speaker describes it as “off the center, / But so much a place to itself” (Lines 49-50), calling it “a small place” (Line 49) from “the John Flock Mortuary Home / Down to the river” (Lines 47-48). The mortuary represents businesses owned by locals, and paradoxically, mainly immigrants or newly arrived immigrant families.

The anecdote about the man throwing his shoe at the car creates an image of a working-class America down on its luck, struggling against economic forces and not coming out on top. The man in his undershirt winds up weeping on the street half-barefoot, holding his “[harmless]” (Line 28) shoe in his hand, saying, ‘“He’s breaking up my home,' he said, / 'The son of a bitch // Bastard is breaking up my home”’ (Lines 32-34).

Yet, amid poverty, the speaker realizes the oneness with poorer and downtrodden people across cultures and historical periods. He says that he identifies as a “young prince // Or aspirant squire” (Lines 51-52) and reads Ivanhoe, noting, as if it is obvious, that the story is about race. He compares the plight of the Saxons to that of the Jews “Or even Coloreds, // With their low-ceilinged, unbelievably / Sour-smelling houses down by the docks” (Lines 54-56).

By making this comparison, the speaker elevates the plight of his community to that of historical peoples. If not lifting them out of their situation, this comparison does expand it to the realm of history, mythology, and the cosmic. It ends with his supposition that each thing is important:

Everything was written

Or woven, ivory and pink and emerald—

Nothin was too ugly or petty or terrible

To be weighed in the immense

Silver scales of the dead: the looming

Balances set right onto the live, dangerous

Gray bark of the street (Lines 57-63).

This last image connects the small, obscure, seemingly unimportant street to the realm of the mystical. It will be judged by the morality of the dead.