Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother burns bacon.

I saw this poem as a commentary on old Southern life the role the wife played as sort of a scapegoat to the house. The idea that she was the "white maid" was one of the idea that stuck with me in the poem. As well as her fear of burning the bacon, "Her bacon burned. She Hastened to hide it in the step-on can, and Drew more strips from the meat case." The whole poem gave off a very Fried Green Tomatoes vibe to me, in the fact that the husband became this central idea of evil in the poem, in which the wife not only had to fear for herself, but as well as her children. I also enjoyed the way in which the man was demonized in the poem in the woman's head, on of the more interesting lines like this that stood out to me was, "She heard no hoof-beat of the horse and saw no flash of the shining steel." It is as if here she was expecting some demonic moment to happen like normal, but then something worse happened in that it didn't.

However, after looking up the history of the poem I then got a new perspective on it as well. The poem was written in response to a murder with occurred in 1955 of an African-american man named Emmett Till. Emmett was murdered for the proposed accusation of flirting with a white woman. However, in this poem I got a sense that if anything the woman wanted to be loved and flirted with, but her husbands fear was so instilled into her that even she could not demonize him once his kiss or soft hand was laid upon her. so in a way the woman, although she wanted to be loved, still had to conform to society's standards of marriage within the time period. Especially the rigorous South.