Topic > The Climax of I Want You Women Up North to Know

Lines 85-97 of Tillie Olsen's first published poem "I Want You Women Up North to Know" contain the climactic turning point of this poem, and the language and form reflect this change. Instead of being humble, disconnected victims who remain mostly anonymous, workers transform into an angry, united group of distinct individuals. This change of mood is achieved through three expedients: images, grouping and capitalization of proper nouns. The imagery in this passage helps transform the tone of the poem from victimhood to anger. Beyond the imagery of fire, the overall language is completely reduced to stark ugliness. In the previous lines, sordidness has been mixed with cheerful euphemisms: the agonizing work is an "exquisite dance" (24); trembling hands are “white seagulls” (22); the cough is "gay" (25). But in these next lines, all the aesthetically pleasing terms fall away, leaving “sweet and… blood” (85), “naked… [and]… bony children” (89), and a “skeletal body” (95). the passage transforms the mood of the poem by using grouping and form to link the workers together, both in inference and appearance. Previously, each worker's situation was treated as an isolated story, literally separated from the others by a blank line. However, lines 85-97 are crowded together without spaces, suggesting unity by the very appearance of the lines. All complaints are repeated briefly, then a sequence of “and”s ties the one-sentence summaries together. Yet despite this sense of solidarity, each person's story is given its own period-bound sentence, which subtly underlines its individual importance: solidarity is acceptable, but anonymity is not. A final significant device in this passage is the use of capital letters. The workers' proper names were sporadically capitalized at the beginning of the poem, but here they are all consistent and correct. Again, this is an emphasis on individual importance, an insistence that each of these people deserves a unique proper name. Early all-lowercase names like "catalina rodiguez" (16) actually blend into the lines of the poem, suggesting crouching and darkness, but here the capital letters in their names clearly stand out from the other words. Interestingly, although personal names are capitalized, “christ” (96) is left in lowercase, similar to the earlier treatment of “god” (57, 60, 62). This contrast with the capitalization of the workers' names implies that God and Christ have failed the workers and are now overshadowed by a nascent self-confidence in the workers..