Speak

With its focus on loneliness, the desire for connection, and empathy with marginalized people, “Speak” has much in common with many other poems by Wright in the collection Shall We Gather at the River, in which it appeared. The speakers in these poems are, for the most part, socially isolated; they express their insecurities and describe the grim realities of their lives.

Several poems feature people on the farthest margins of society. “The Poor Washed up by Chicago Winter” features a transient or unhoused speaker, who is “Alone without / Any company,” and wonders about how he can get out of the city; his choices are to pretend religious faith that he doesn’t have, or to accept arrest and imprisonment: “I can either move into the McCormick Theological Seminary / And get a good night's sleep, / Or else get hauled back to Minneapolis.” He also sketches the sad, unknown fates of the Chicago poor: “Do they die? / Where are they buried?”—questions that seem to be about others but also indirectly address his own circumstance. Similarly, the first stanza of “In Terror of Hospital Bills” is as bleak as it gets:

I still have some money

To eat with, alone

And frightened, knowing how soon 

I will waken a poor man.