What Is The Mood Of The Poem On The Subway

“On the Subway” is a poem by Sharon Olds. The speaker is a white woman who is alone in a subway car with a presumably poor black man. The poem has two sides; the first is that of the white woman and the second is that of the young black man. Sharon Olds develops these two sides through the use of metaphor, imagery, and real world situations. Throughout the poem the speaker talks about light and dark. The references to light and dark act as a continuous metaphor. Light refers to, not just the speaker, but white people in general and the comparable ease of their lives in oppose to the lives of their black counterparts. Dark, of course, represents black people. The speaker says, “without meaning or / trying to I must profit from his darkness.” Furthermore the speaker thinks about how the boy is like black cotton absorbing the heat of the nation’s less than kind attitude towards black men. She, meaning the speaker, has lead a far different life. She states, “There is / no way to know how easy this / white skin makes my life.” Light symbolizes goodness and the ease of her life to the dark of the man’s life.

The speaker describes the young man by saying he had the look of a mugger, he wore red the same shade as the inside of a body. The reader can with ease imagine this shifty character lurking down an abandoned street in the dark of night. Then the speaker depicts an image of herself as wearing fur, the skin of an animal. Fur is expensive so the reader knows this woman has money. She also mentions how the black man could take the coat and her briefcase so now the reader sees this woman in some cushy job at a business or law firm. The two images are representative of two different worlds that would not normally