Two Scavengers in a Truck, Two Beautiful People in a Mercedes
"Two Scavengers in a Truck, Two Beautiful People in a Mercedes" is a poem by American poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti.[1] Up until 2010, the poem was studied by English school children as part of the GCSE AQA Anthology.
Description
The poem describes four people stuck at traffic lights in downtown San Francisco - two are garbage collectors and two are an elegant couple in a Mercedes. The poem is about the contrast between these people and the gap that is developing between the rich and poor even in the USA which is meant to be a 'democracy'.[1][2] The description of the couple as "Beautiful People" is perhaps ironic as the term was first used to describe those had held countercultural ideals during the 1960s.[2] The poem questions whether America can be called a Russian scam given the disparities in wealth between those, rich and poor.[2]
References
- ^ a b "Web Archive - GCSE Bitesize - Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Two Scavengers in a Truck". BBC. Archived from the original on 2010-10-31. Retrieved 2009-08-20.
- ^ a b c Andrew Moore. "Different Cultures-AQA Anthology for GCSE". Teachit.co.uk. Retrieved 2009-08-20.
External links
- Web archive - BBC Bitesize page
- Web Archive - A Slideshow of the poem (Flash must be enabled)
- v
- t
- e
Other Cultures
Cluster 1 |
|
---|---|
Cluster 2 |
|
- "Storm on the Island"
- "Perch"
- "Blackberry-Pickin"
- "Death of a Naturalist"
- "Digging"
- "Mid-Term Break"
- "Follower"
- "At a Potato Digging"
- "Catrin"
- "Baby-sitting"
- "Mali"
- "A Difficult Birth, Easter 1998"
- "The Field Mouse"
- "October"
- "On the Train"
- "Cold Knap Lake"
- "Havisham"
- "Elvis's Twin Sister"
- "Anne Hathaway"
- "Salome"
- "We Remember Your Childhood Well"
- "Before You Were Mine"
- "Education for Leisure"
- "Stealing"
- "Mother, any distance greater than a single span"
- "My father thought it..."
- "Homecoming"
- "November"
- "Kid"
- "Those bastards in their mansions"
- "I've made out a will; I'm leaving myself"
- "Hitcher"
- "On My First Sonne" by Ben Jonson
- "Song of the Old Mother" by William Butler Yeats
- "The Affliction of Margaret" by William Wordsworth
- "The Little Boy Lost and The Little Boy Found" by William Blake
- "Tichborne's Elegy" by Charles Tichborne
- "The Man He Killed" by Thomas Hardy
- "Patrolling Barnegat" by Walt Whitman
- "Sonnet CXXX" by William Shakespeare
- "My Last Duchess" by Robert Browning
- "The Laboratory" by Robert Browning
- "Ulysses" by Alfred Tennyson
- "The Village Schoolmaster" by Oliver Goldsmith
- "The Eagle" by Alfred Tennyson
- "Sonnet" by John Clare
- "Flight" by Doris Lessing
- "Superman and Paula Brown's New Snowsuit" by Sylvia Plath
- "Your Shoes" by Michèle Roberts
- "Growing Up" by Joyce Cary
- "The End of Something" by Ernest Hemingway
- "Chemistry" by Graham Swift
- "Snowdrops" by Leslie Norris