Although the speaker doesn’t seem to buy into the sanctity of his abuela’s “numerology” in any mystical sense, this poem explores the ways in which la charada was nevertheless “sacred” to the speaker because of its cultural and personal importance in the speaker’s childhood. This cultural and personal significance is underscored by the fact that it comes from his abuela (grandmother), a figure who connects the speaker both to Cuban culture and a rich source of nostalgic childhood memories when it could be difficult to form this connection as a child of an immigrant. As Blanco himself writes,

I sense there is a general misconception that children of immigrants and exiles embrace their given culture and heritage since childhood. For me, at least, that wasn’t the case; there was an initial rejection of my cubanidad due to a generational and linguistic divide. Whatever my parents and grandparents liked was immediate grounds for rejection. They listened to salsa, I listened to AC/DC; they spoke Spanish, my brother and I insisted on English. And this is how I spent most of childhood and adolescence until I was mature enough — in my early 20s — to let those questions that had subconsciously lingered in me surface: Where am I from? Where is home? Where do I belong?


Blanco, Richard. “An American Dream, A Cuban Soul: Poet Richard Blanco Finds ‘Home’” NPR. NPR, 20 Feb. 2015. Web. 15 June 2015.

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As explained above, “la charada” connected numbers with certain words, and it was especially popular as a means to predict winning lottery numbers in games like Bolita.

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They’re ALL creative decisions. Obviously they draw heaps from actual medieval practices, but this isn’t historical non-fiction, nor even historical fiction! It’s GoT.

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Of course it is! It’s a misogynistic world in a million ways! Almost all literature ever has been set in a misogynistic world to some extent. But does that make the writers sexist for creating this fictional world? No. Does it mean we should stop watching the show? Only if you’d rather close your eyes to all misogyny in literature than witness how incredible characters fight against this world, sometimes prevailing, sometimes tragically failing.

Also, there’s this false dichotomy that guides this article: Medieval and fine? Or contemporary and condemnable? I’m not really sure I understand that.

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Check out the Genius annotated version of the song here!

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For more on Hugh Rodham’s approach to this American bargain, check out the first chapter of Hillary’s memoir, Living History. Here’s a selection:

Without alerting his parents, he hopped a freight train to Chicago to look for work and found a job selling drapery fabrics around the Midwest. When he came back to tell his parents and pack his bags, Hannah was furious and forbade him to go. But my grandfa- ther pointed out that jobs were hard to come by, and the family could use the money for Russell’s college and medical education. So my father moved to Chicago. All week, he traveled around the upper Midwest from Des Moines to Duluth, then drove to Scranton most weekends to turn over his paycheck to his mother. Though he always suggested that his reasons for leaving Scranton were economic, I believe my father knew that he had to make a break from Hannah if he was ever to live his own life.


Clinton, Hillary Rodham. Living History. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003. Print.

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Thoreau begins to anthropomorphize these ants, and in doing so transitions into allegory and social satire. Francis Ross writes on this movement,

Like the changing currents in a stream we are urged farther away from literal description and towards allegory. The narrator maintains his position of omniscient observer; his stature now is god-like. History swirls under him in diminutive circles: men and ants share a common environment on earth.

By using the Latin words duellum (duel) and bellum (war), Thoreau reminds us of the prominence of wars in human history; but by applying these terms to ants, he questions how rational any war could ever be—after all, we can talk about ants in the same way.


Ross, Francis D. “Rhetorical Procedure in Thoreau’s "Battle of the Ants”" College Composition and Communication 16.1 (1965): 14-18. JSTOR. Web. 11 June 2015.

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Although these lines don’t explicitly reference Achilles or the Myrmidons, I think this is the mock-epic vein’s peak in the “Battle of the Ants.” Christopher Phillips writes,

Here Thoreau literalizes the mock-epic trope of placing the tiny subject under a microscope in order to magnify it (artificially) to epic stature. However, his emphasis on his own sight throughout this passage, as his emphasis on his own translation of Homer elsewhere in Walden, argues that epic is only in the eye of the poetic beholder.

Additionally, the brutally graphic descriptions of the fighting (“exposing what vitals he had there to the jaws of the black warrior”) mimic Homeric style, especially in the Iliad.


Phillips, Christopher N. “Thoreau’s Homeric Eyeball.” Epic in American Culture: Settlement to Reconstruction. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2012. N. pag. Print.

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This paragraph begins Thoreau’s famous “Battle of the Ants” episode, but ants actually first appear in Chapter 2 of Walden:

Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men; like pygmies we fight with cranes; it is error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness.

So very early on, Thoreau identifies humanity with ants to criticize the “evitable wretchedness” he saw in human behavior. Keeping this critique in mind is helpful for understanding this passage as social satire, but the “Battle of the Ants” shouldn’t be confined to that genre—we keep this passage in our anthologies because it has so much more to offer, including mock-epic aspects (also evoked in the initial consideration of ants with the reference to Ovid’s “fable” about the Myrmidons) and a downright hilarious narrator who has been living in the woods alone for so long that he spends his time looking at ants fight under a microscope.

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