To complete the questions below, you will need to read and analyze the three poems assigned to you in the previous homework assignment. (Which are below)

Poem - "Standard Oil Co."

1. How does Neruda depict Standard Oil Company in this poem? Is it a positive or negative image? In your response, make sure to cite specific verses from the poem to justify your answer.

2. Besides telling us from the outset that Standard drills for oil, what else does the poem allow us to see about the same company's actions that is detrimental to the American continent? Please cite the poem in responding to this question.

Poem - "Anaconda Mining Co."

3. The Anaconda Mining Company is here depicted as a serpent. What does this animal do to "my nephews, my children," as we read in the poem?

4. The poem mentions "Chuquicamata" several times and "Pisagua". Please Google both terms and, in a couple of sentences, describe what they are?

5. In this poem, we learn that the Anaconda Mining company doesn't just dig up copper from Chilean lands. What else does it do that is vividly illuminated in the verses?

Poem - "United Fruit Co."

6. What criticism does this poem lash out over the corporations, among them the United Fruit Company, mentioned in the initial verses? Why the reference to the divine?

7. This poem uses the phrase "Banana Republics". Please read the following article:

https://visualizingtheamericas.utm.utoronto.ca/key-moments/banana-republics/Links to an external site.

...and then, in your own words, explain what is meant by the term.

8. In this poem, we learn that the United Fruit Co. wasn't just a fruit company. What else was it doing in Central America?

The three poems

9. After you analyze the three poems, you get the sense that the corporations mentioned therein are not acting on their own terms throughout Latin America. Who do the poems suggest is behind the corporations? And how or where do you infer that?

10. Though you likely have not readCanto General in its entirety,think about how the three poems assigned to you fit within Neruda's attempt at writing a"history" of Latin America through poetry. What essentially is Neruda telling us about Latin America and its history through the poems you read?

Transcribed Image Text:

3 Poems from Pablo Neruda's 1950 Canto General translated by Jack Schmitt Standard Oil Co. When the drill bored down toward the stony fissures and plunged its implacable intestine into the subterranean estates, and dead years, eyes of the ages, imprisoned plants' roots and scaly systems became strata of water, fire shot up through the tubes transformed into cold liquid, in the customs house of the heights, issuing from its world of sinister depth, it encountered a pale engineer and a title deed. However entangled the petroleum's arteries may be, however the layers may change their silent site and move their sovereignty amid the earth's bowels, when the fountain gushes its paraffin foliage, Standard Oil arrived beforehand with its checks and it guns, with its governments and its prisoners. Their obese emperors from New York are suave smiling assassins who buy silk, nylon, cigars petty tyrants and dictators. They buy countries, people, seas, police, county councils, distant regions where the poor hoard their corn like misers their gold: Standard Oil awakens them, clothes them in uniforms, designates which brother is the enemy. the Paraguayan fights its war, and the Bolivian wastes away in the jungle with its machine gun. A President assassinated for a drop of petroleum, a million-acre mortgage, a swift execution on a morning mortal with light, petrified, a new prison camp for subversives, in Patagonia, a betrayal, scattered shots beneath a petroliferous moon, a subtle change of ministers in the capital, a whisper like an oil tide, and zap, you'll see how Standard Oil's letters shine above the clouds, above the seas, in your home, illuminating their dominions. Anaconda ining Co. Name of a coiled snake, insatiable gullet, green monster, in the clustered heights, in my country's rarefied saddle, beneath the moon of hardness--excavator- you open the mineral's lunar craters, the galleries of virgin copper, sheathed in its granite sands. In Chuquicamata's eternal night, in the heights, I've seen the sacrificial fire burn, the profuse crackling of the cyclops that devoured the Chileans' hands, weight and waist, coiling them beneath its copper vertebrae, draining their warm blood, crushing their skeletons and spitting them out in the desolate desert wastelands. Air resounds in the heights of starry Chuquicamata. The galleries annihilate the planet's resistance with man's little hands, the gorges' sulphuric bird trembles, the metal's iron cold mutinies with its sullen scars, and when the horns blast the earth swallows a procession of minuscule men who descend to the crater's mandibles. They're tiny captains, my nephews, my children, and when they pour the ingots toward the seas, wipe their brows and return shuddering to the uttermost chill, the great serpent eats them up, reduces them, crushes them, covers them with malignant spittle, casts them out to the roads, murders them with police, sets them to rot in Pisagua, imprisons them, spits on them, buys a trecherous president who insults and persecutes them, kills them with hunger on the plains of the sandy immensity. And on the infernal slopes there's cross after twisted cross, the only kindling scattered by the tree of mining. United Fruit Co. When the trumpet sounded everything was prepared on earth, and Jehovah gave the world to Coca-Cola Inc., Anaconda, Ford Motors, and other corporations. The United Fruit Company reserved for itself the most juicy piece, the central coast of my world, the delicate waist of America. It rebaptized these countries Banana Republics, and over the sleeping dead, over the unquiet heroes who won greatness, liberty, and banners, it established an opera buffa: it abolished free will, gave out imperial crowns, encouraged envy, attracted the dictatorship of flies: Trujillo flies, Tachos flies Carias flies, Martinez flies, Ubico flies, flies sticky with submissive blood and marmalade, drunken flies that buzz over the tombs of the people, circus flies, wise flies expert at tyranny. With the bloodthirsty flies came the Fruit Company, amassed coffee and fruit in ships which put to sea like overloaded trays with the treasures from our sunken lands. Meanwhile the Indians fall into the sugared depths of the harbors and are buried in the morning mists; a corpse rolls, a thing without name, a discarded number, a bunch of rotten fruit thrown on the garbage heap. 3 Poems from Pablo Neruda's 1950 Canto General translated by Jack Schmitt Standard Oil Co. When the drill bored down toward the stony fissures and plunged its implacable intestine into the subterranean estates, and dead years, eyes of the ages, imprisoned plants' roots and scaly systems became strata of water, fire shot up through the tubes transformed into cold liquid, in the customs house of the heights, issuing from its world of sinister depth, it encountered a pale engineer and a title deed. However entangled the petroleum's arteries may be, however the layers may change their silent site and move their sovereignty amid the earth's bowels, when the fountain gushes its paraffin foliage, Standard Oil arrived beforehand with its checks and it guns, with its governments and its prisoners. Their obese emperors from New York are suave smiling assassins who buy silk, nylon, cigars petty tyrants and dictators. They buy countries, people, seas, police, county councils, distant regions where the poor hoard their corn like misers their gold: Standard Oil awakens them, clothes them in uniforms, designates which brother is the enemy. the Paraguayan fights its war, and the Bolivian wastes away in the jungle with its machine gun. A President assassinated for a drop of petroleum, a million-acre mortgage, a swift execution on a morning mortal with light, petrified, a new prison camp for subversives, in Patagonia, a betrayal, scattered shots beneath a petroliferous moon, a subtle change of ministers in the capital, a whisper like an oil tide, and zap, you'll see how Standard Oil's letters shine above the clouds, above the seas, in your home, illuminating their dominions. Anaconda ining Co. Name of a coiled snake, insatiable gullet, green monster, in the clustered heights, in my country's rarefied saddle, beneath the moon of hardness--excavator- you open the mineral's lunar craters, the galleries of virgin copper, sheathed in its granite sands. In Chuquicamata's eternal night, in the heights, I've seen the sacrificial fire burn, the profuse crackling of the cyclops that devoured the Chileans' hands, weight and waist, coiling them beneath its copper vertebrae, draining their warm blood, crushing their skeletons and spitting them out in the desolate desert wastelands. Air resounds in the heights of starry Chuquicamata. The galleries annihilate the planet's resistance with man's little hands, the gorges' sulphuric bird trembles, the metal's iron cold mutinies with its sullen scars, and when the horns blast the earth swallows a procession of minuscule men who descend to the crater's mandibles. They're tiny captains, my nephews, my children, and when they pour the ingots toward the seas, wipe their brows and return shuddering to the uttermost chill, the great serpent eats them up, reduces them, crushes them, covers them with malignant spittle, casts them out to the roads, murders them with police, sets them to rot in Pisagua, imprisons them, spits on them, buys a trecherous president who insults and persecutes them, kills them with hunger on the plains of the sandy immensity. And on the infernal slopes there's cross after twisted cross, the only kindling scattered by the tree of mining. United Fruit Co. When the trumpet sounded everything was prepared on earth, and Jehovah gave the world to Coca-Cola Inc., Anaconda, Ford Motors, and other corporations. The United Fruit Company reserved for itself the most juicy piece, the central coast of my world, the delicate waist of America. It rebaptized these countries Banana Republics, and over the sleeping dead, over the unquiet heroes who won greatness, liberty, and banners, it established an opera buffa: it abolished free will, gave out imperial crowns, encouraged envy, attracted the dictatorship of flies: Trujillo flies, Tachos flies Carias flies, Martinez flies, Ubico flies, flies sticky with submissive blood and marmalade, drunken flies that buzz over the tombs of the people, circus flies, wise flies expert at tyranny. With the bloodthirsty flies came the Fruit Company, amassed coffee and fruit in ships which put to sea like overloaded trays with the treasures from our sunken lands. Meanwhile the Indians fall into the sugared depths of the harbors and are buried in the morning mists; a corpse rolls, a thing without name, a discarded number, a bunch of rotten fruit thrown on the garbage heap.

Answer rating: 100% (QA)

Answer Poem Standard Oil Co 1 Neruda depicts Standard Oil Company as a powerful and oppressive entity that exploits natural resources for profit The image portrayed in the poem is overwhelmingly negat... View the full answer