This is classic Faulkner. A quoted observation from the women is followed by a grand, poetic statement of summation. “The gross, teeming world”–the diction is neo-biblical and would be in danger of coming off as pretentious overstatement in a lesser writer’s hands.

The short punch of the first line expresses all of Miss Emily’s aversion to the town and its agents. The nervous men who talk to her “come to a stumbling halt” with their business while the “invisible watch tick[s]”–a reminder of time’s passage and another symbolic connection between Miss Emily and the town’s history. The detail makes it seem as if the clock keeps ticking throughout the next scene.

The narration begins to differentiate the town’s ideas of Miss Emily in the first sentence. The men regard her with “respectful affection” while the women approach her with “curiosity”–mostly just wanting to snoop inside her house.

The conventional role of the small-town Southern man as cultural caretaker is juxtaposed with the women’s more insidious desire to learn about Miss Emily, a woman who refused to live within the polite confines of Southern female society. The story can be read as a dark version of a love story, centering on the relations and reactions of the men versus the women to Miss Emily.

“‘Strange Fruit’ offers a text that ekphrastically generates an image and manipulates that image for rhetorical effect. The sparse description of the scene and the attention to the deteriorating body in the scene help to reframe the image as anti-lynching by absorbing the qualities and functions of arguments previously made in the anti-lynching movement. The image conjured in the performance of “Strange Fruit” is only bound by the limited details provided in the song, and it can be imaginatively adapted to each listener’s level of exposure to accounts or other images of lynching because it does not reference a particular lynching. The generality of the song’s description of a lynching scene, rather than a detailed narrative account of a specific lynching, allows the image to remain malleable. The song positions audience members in relation to the scene so that they might mentally couple the metaphor and the descriptions within “Strange Fruit” with any prior exposure to a lynching scene in images or discursive accounts”

• Perry, Samuel. “"Strange Fruit” Ekphrasis and the Lynching Scene.“ Rhetoric Society Quarterly 43.5 (2013): 449-74.

The word pastoral in literature refers to the portrayal of an idealized version of country life.

Here the ‘pastoral scene of the gallant south’ is juxtaposed against the graphic and detailed horror that follows in the next lines.

“Above all, the [poem] disintegrates the White myths of America, the myth of innocence”
-Pramuk, Christopher. “"Strange Fruit”: Black Suffering/ White Revelation.“ Theological Studies 67.2 (2006): 345-77

Indeed the South was flush with baronial pomp, champagne and moonlight – however, always at work were darker undertones of racial injustice and the horrors of slavery.

Written as an anti-lynching song the idea of “strange fruit” is a haunting one. “Southern trees” refers to the American South, where at the time of writing lynching was still prevalent. One could take “strange fruit” to mean the black bodies hanging from the trees. “Blood at the root” suggests the cycle of violence. The lynch mobs water the tree with blood breeding evermore hateful fervor.

In terms of the use of “fruit” here, “the single figure in the poem is the fruit and the trees that bear them. We think of fruit as full of life, as a certain culmination of the life of the plant that produces them. They are the sweet, moist flesh of a deeply rooted and flourishing plant. Fruit are so full of life itself that their death, whether through consumption or neglect, gives life by nourishing another living thing or by providing the seeds for more fruit-producing plants. The fruit are strange, in this poem, because they are the product of a violent and fearful form of life, typecast as Southern, figured in the tree with blood at its roots. The life those fruit once had was already bloody, beaten, violated, and abused, as was the life of those nourished by making the life of those fruit bloody from beatings, violations, and abuse.”
- Cavalho, John M. “"Strange Fruit”: Music Between Violence and Death.“ The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 71.1 (2013): 111-19.