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Leadbelly
By: Cornelius Eady
You can actually hear it in his voice: Sometimes the only way to discuss it Is to grip a guitar as if it were Somebody's throat And pluck. If there were A ship off of this planet, An ark where the blues could show Its other face, A street where you could walk, Just walk without dogged air at Your heels, at your back, don't You think he'd choose it? Meanwhile, here's the tune: Bad luck, empty pockets, Trouble walking your way With his tin ear.
In the first stanza, you can tell the subject of the poem is under a great strain by the metaphor “grip a guitar as if it were somebody's throat and pluck"(Eady 3-5). He is felling the pressures of the world. In the second stanza, the subject is looking for an ecsape. A place where “the blues could show it's other face"(Eady 7-8). Which we can infer would be happiness. In stanza three, the author elaborates on this escape then brings us back to the reality. The reality with “bad luck, empty pockets and trouble walking your way with his tin ear"(Eady 14-16). These all are prolbems the subject faces. But, not alone. The reference to “trouble with his tin ear" suggests that trouble listens to no one.
