A Song for Myself Poems Summary

In the poem "A Song for Myself," the narrator discusses the human soul. Those who are bad men cannot escape the afterlife. In death, there is truth. If the person is a bad person in life and has a bad soul, they will be condemned in the afterlife. The narrator hopes he has a good enough soul to have a good afterlife.

In "The Shift of Gears," a man goes to garage to fix his car. He asks the mechanic what is wrong. The mechanic replies he shifts the gears too aggressively, much like steering a horse.

In "The Ballad of the Rattlesnake," black and white sharecroppers sit together. One sharecropper tells the following tale of when he visited the American South. The Apache Indians tie up a blond-haired man and torture him. The Apache...