Lincoln’s preliminary Emancipation Proclamation received criticizm from anti-emancipation newspaper editors who believed such a radical document would incite race riots. Lincoln included this paragraph as a result.

Laboring for reasonable wages becomes one of the most important ideals of Reconstruction. Here Lincoln re-asserts his confidence in the way of the yeoman farmer, who would toil and benefit from the fruits of his labor, which is exactly what was denied to slaves (among other things).

Fun fact: When growing up Lincoln was rented out to other farmers by his father and, in accordance to the law back then, all of the profit earned by Lincoln from the work he had done for other farmers would go to his father. In this way, Lincoln had sympathy for those who worked without receiving anything in return.

As Spring causes the petals on the flowers to open and bloom, she is opening his heart. He compared his heart to closed fingers, and the fingers are compared to the petals in the spring, both being opened by her and the Spring.

Love causes small changes in the person who falls under its influence and opens them to new experiences and happinesses, just as “Spring” opens the flowers in ways that are not at first visible to the naked eye.

The metaphor here describes a level of helplessness to the will of the woman, though not one that seems manipulative or deliberate. The metaphorical connection to Spring implies a surrender to Nature and the inevitable. Rotella suggests that this theme is prevalent in Cummings’s work, his “habitual critique of analytic philosophy and science of and of institutional religion underscores the argument that man might better ensure his own growth by following nature’s yielding example than by demanding that nature be more or less than it is.” Nature, Time, and Transcendence in Cummings' Later Poems

Now he’s starting to score like the Shaq Attack.

Clear reference to Fab Five Freddy, an early hip-hopper.

A reference to American religious leader Clarence 13X’s Five Percent Nation, a group that split from the Nation of Islam.

Clarence believed that all black men were divine and took the name Allah to symbolize this status. He rejected the belief in an invisible God, teaching that God could be found within each black man.

He referred to his new movement as the Five Percenters, referencing a NOI teaching that only five percent of the population knew and promoted the truth about God.

“Five plate” is meant to evoke the Five Percenters – and Clarence 13X was once placed in psychiatric care by police who literally thought he had schizophrenia.

Clarence 13X and the Five Percenters are also referenced in this line from ‘Where I’m From’.

The Bay Area is the real, trillest, cokest, most gettin'-it-innest place in America. Ask Ronald Dregan.

Digable Planets, like A Tribe Called Quest, were part of the “cool out breed” of hip hop artists that came about in the early ‘90s. An opposite reaction to gangsta rap and rap feuds, etc.

Here they are probably saying that they fly because they aren’t proponents of the drama that accompanied a lot of rap… a chill alternative.