Workin' on it!

In our day and age, most people enter the workforce between the ages of 16-20 for the first time, and the idea of having a job is very exciting. It’s a new experience where you can finally get money without relying on your parents or anyone else. Even though the paychecks people usually get when they’re 16-18 aren’t enough to survive without parents or other support, the fact that the money is yours is an incredible rush of excitement, especially the first paycheck.

Unfortunately, somewhere down the line, a job becomes less exciting and even dreadful. That youthful excitement turns to woe as the thought of going to work has changed from a new experience to our own personal version of Groundhog’s Day. Not all jobs are like this, but the two sides are very dramatically different.

These two extreme views on having a job are present in the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Rita Dove in their poems “Career” and “My Father Enters the Work Force” respectively. In “Career”, Dunbar writes;

Oh, circumscribe me not by rules

That serve to lead the minds of fools!

But give me pow’r to work my will,

And at my deeds the world shall thrill

During Dunbar’s time, his work was chosen for him, and there was no such thing as a “dream job” like most teenagers and young adults think of today. His work and fate had been sealed for him, and his poetry shows the inevitable dread that comes from the time in which he lived.

Rita Dove pens a different idea about the work place. Her poem “My Father Enters the Work Force” is a poem that describes the work that will have to be done with the new job, and it seems very pessimistic. The work is tedious, and words such as “rougher” and “forever” are used to describe the tasks at hand, but the last two lines of the poem show the joy that can come with having a job;

No more postponed groceries,

And that blue pair of shoes!

This is the youthful excitement that I described earlier with young adults when they get that first paycheck. Rita Dove’s words show the excitement that a job can bring, because it makes life easier through the money earned, while Dunbar shows the absolute disparity that comes with a job as it becomes a daily, mindless activity that can’t be changed. Two very different ideas, two very different worlds, but both still existing today. Is work supposed to be happy, or just a drag? 


Suggested blog of the week: http://billmoyers.com/content/rita-dove%E2%80%99s-list-of-young-poets-to-watch/