By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The speaker addresses inherited mastery as a class relation built on labor, distance, and the memory of industrial Pittsburgh.
The repeated word `master` is the engine of the page. It moves from father to son, from dignity to foreignness, and from personal address to social accusation. Silk sheets, the Monongahia, and the workers beneath the wealth make the poem read like a brief reckoning with old authority and the distance between owners and the people they used.
The `long way back to a foreign master` is restated here in second person — addressed to a man whose father was master and who inherits the role. `We were your sillk sheets / The river mean toe / Here on the Monongahia`. Class inheritance delivered as direct address.