"I Am Ready to Tell All I Know"
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The poem "I Am Ready to Tell All I Know" by Minnie Bruce Pratt is structured as a dramatic interaction between mother and son. It is told from the point of view of the mother, who is the one who offers to tell all she knows. This title alone creates in the reader a sense of a revelation about to take place, and the rest of the poem indicates that this revelation is one that both specific to a given situation and generalized to parent-child relationships everywhere. The specific situation is of a child from the South going to school in the North and learning of a history that has been kept from him, a history that his mother is now ready top reveal. It is a history of racial injustice and murder, and the young man is surprised to learn of it in school and to learn that his mother has known of this and not told him. The mother for her part is ready to tell all she knows, ready because she has come to realize that all young people are linked just as all parents are linked--how would she feel if the young man hung by a mob were her child? The poet guides the reader to an understanding of why the mother is ready to tell all she knows and to what it is that she knows. The dilemma is brought forth in the first stanza as the young man refers to what he has learned of southern history and to the terrible things that have happened there--it is clear that he never heard these things before and that he is in some distress about them. The mother speaks "From the South," and it
. . .
be seen from either side of the door.
The first line indicates that the dead outnumber us, meaning the living, and that their numbers continue to swell every day. Death is linked to the past so firmly and distantly that the poet uses Minos as a reference, for the dead from now immediately become one with the Minos of thousands of years ago. The poet sets a scene win which the dead are first processed, a term that evokes officious and official acts in the here and now with a bureaucracy of the dead in the afterlife, and then sit down in groups and watch TV. They see the living on television, and by extension they see life on television, the life they have left behind, the life they never are able to share. They see other people advancing while they remain the same, and they become frustrated by this fact and comment on it:
"He misses me? He must be kidding
--This week she's sleeping with a cop."
"All she reads now is Little Gidding."
"They're getting old. I wish they'd stop" (Gunn 83).
The imagery, however, evokes the idea that the people in this world are not living because they are sitting and watching television, watching the lives of other people, and slowly becoming more and more isolated, as do the dead:
The h
. . .
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 3762
Approximate Pages = 15 (250 words per page)
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