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. The scan-backed `sillk sheets`, `The river man too`, the Monongahia, and the inherited father figure make the poem read like a brief reckoning with old authority and the distance between owners and the people they used.
A second-person reckoning with inherited class power: 'Your father was the master and now you are a master', a 'master of dignity' who is 'Foriegn as you are from us / White and black'. The accusation is plainspoken - 'You made your money of us / We were your sillk sheets' - and rooted in place, 'Here on the Monongahia', recalling that the father 'Could through a line'. It closes on distance made permanent: 'From know on / It will always be a long way back to a foriegn master'. Source spellings 'Foriegn', 'sillk', 'Monongahia', 'through', 'From know on' preserved.