[P]erhaps Rukeyser’s most stunning advance beyond proletcult and bourgeois aesthetics alike is her distinctively feminist rendering of social empowerment. To begin with, it is the mother’s compassionate narrative in the "Absalom" section that augurs women’s revisionary authority . . . . Mrs. Jones’ poignant story of the loss of three sons to silicosis stands out as the poem’s at once most desperate and heroic portrait. Failing to persuade the company’s doctor to examine or treat her sons for silicosis, she "went out on the road and begged the X-ray money" (28).

In the next in a series of poems in which the workers and their families speak in their own words, in "Absalom" (pp. 27-30) the speaker is Mrs. Jones, another member of the defense committee and the mother not of one but of three sons who have died of silicosis. Her husband is dying and unable to work. Her language is straightforward and affecting:

Shirley was my youngest son; the boy.

He went into the tunnel.

    My heart    my mother    my heart     my mother

The Congressional inquiry into the power companies' financial culpability is blocked as the breathing of stricken miners is blocked. The words of the subcommittee investigating the silicosis deaths have little impact: these "Words on a monument. / Capitoline thunder . . . cannot be enough" ( OS 37). In response to the futile words of this official monument, the poem counterposes its own monumental figure: "dead John Brown's body walking from a tunnel / to break the armored and concluded mind" (OS 37).

The most ironic testimony to the lethal power of whiteness is that of George Robinson, a black migrant driller who became the workers' "leader and voice," who "holds all their strength together: / To fight the companies to make somehow a future" (OS 16). His insider's description of Gauley Bridge contrasts ironically with the reporter's first impressions: "Gauley Bridge is a good town for Negroes, they let us stand around, they let us stand / around on the sidewalks if we're black or brown" (OS 21).

. . . "Arthur Peyton," describes another worker's body in the act of assuming the characteristics of his materials, this time employing more explicitly technological imagery. The speaker, also a miner with silicosis, asks the woman he would have married to testify for him—"O love tell the committee that I know"—so that she can project his haunting, ghostly voice into the official avenues of the legal system. He describes himself and his world taken over by glass, in volatile images that suggest the speaker's faltering hold on language and on life:

Rukeyser presents this allure as superficial, sinister, deceptive:

This is the most audacious landscape. The gangster's

stance with his gun smoking and out is not so

vicious as this commercial field, its hill of glass.

 

Sloping as gracefully as thighs, the foothills

narrow to this, clouds over every town

finally indicate the stored destruction. (OS 28)

As she gathers momentum, Rukeyser amplifies the religious and political implications of "Alloy" in the crucial sequence, "Power" and "The Dam." Before she moves into the depths, first of the powerhouse, then of the dam, in "Power" (pp. 49-53) Rukeyser draws on the resources of classical poetic forms and language to bring alive the setting: "the quick sun," the warm mountains, a vital, sexualized landscape that answers to the love and sexualized body of the poet who "sees perfect cliffs ranging until the river / cuts sheer, mapped far below in delicate track, / surprise of grace .

The lyrical "Power" section begins on an unabashedly aestheticizing note; we soon learn, however, that the plant is built upon—and literally covers over—a darker, more complex version of "power." Rukeyser at first describes the power plant as a harmonious element of a beautiful natural landscape. She anthropomorphizes its graceful, even delicate form: "Steel-bright, light-pointed, the narrow-waisted towers / lift their protective network . . . / gymnast, they poise their freight" (OS 29).

We are meant to hold these clusters of meaning in the mind as they reveal the fullness of reality. Some of the meanings the poet is allowing to expand into their conteallations are these: in "Power" death is both finality and source of power; but in another sense, one cannot say that power has any source, any beginning or end -- thus the first line of "The Dam." But that line is followed by

Rises

in the green season, in the sudden season

the white the budded

    and the lost.

. . . "The Dam" voices the possibility that witnessing can again divert or transform power. While the "Power" section ends with the line "this is the end," "The Dam" begins, "All power is saved, having no end" (OS 31). The second law of thermodynamics, the law of the conservation of energy, is crucial to the poem's movement from charting the destruction of individual bodies to affirming workers' enduring power; Rukeyser's invocation of scientific laws extends to including the formula for the velocity of falling water within her text.