Trethewey's 'History Lesson'

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Recommended: Understanding T.S. Eliot's work

Trethewey’s “History Lesson” reflects on past racial struggles and inequalities. She uses metaphors, similes, symbols, and imagery to emphasize the central concern of the poem, which includes things changing over time. The symbols that stand out to understand the central concern of the poem are the camera, the photograph of the narrator and the photograph of the narrator’s grandmother. The camera symbolizes the time that has passed between the generations of the grandmother and the narrator. It acts as a witness of the past and the present after taking the photos of the narrator in the bikini and the grandmother in the dress. Her grandmother is wearing a “cotton meal-sack dress” (l. 17), showing very little skin exposure, representing

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