Electricity comes to
cocoa bottom.
Presentation by Eduardo and Adrien
Electricity comes to cocoa bottom
Then all the children of Cocoa Bottom
bamboo lining the dirt road stopped its swaying,
such that the long grass bent forward
went to see Mr.Samuel’s electric lights.
and evening came as soft as chiffon curtains:
stretching across the bank like so many bowed heads.
They camped on the grass bank outside his house,
Closing. Closing.
And a voice in the wind whispered:
their lamps filled with oil,
Is there one among us to record this moment?
for sunset,
Light!
But there was none —
watching the sky turn yellow, orange.
Mr. Samuel smiling on the verandah —
Grannie Patterson across the road
a silhouette against the yellow shimmer behind him —
no one (except for a few warm rocks
peeped through the crack in her porch door.
and there arising such a gasp,
hidden among mongoose ferns) even heard a sound.
The cable was drawn like a pencil line across the sun.
such a fluttering of wings,
Already the children of Cocoa Bottom
The fireflies waited in the shadows,
tweet-a-whit,
had lit their lamps for the dark journey home,
their lanterns off.
such a swaying, swaying.
and it was too late —
The kling-klings* swooped in from the hills,
Light! Marvellous light!
the moment had passed.
congregating in the orange trees.
And then the breeze rose up from above the trees,
A breeze coming home from sea held its breath;
swelling and swelling into a wind
So what is the meaning behind this poem?
From the poem we can see that cocoa bottom is a poor village as the
people are still running on oil lamps, but there is this one person that is
wealthier than the others and he managed to get electricity in his house.
One of the major clues in the poem that show where cocoa bottom is in
the world, is the bird “Kling-Klings”.
Activity: Using google images, find where the Kling-Klings are from and
you will have found where this village is.
(3mins)
Here is a clue of what the bird looks like! >>>
The structure
The poem has been written in 3 stanzas and each one of them
describes different steps of their night.
- The first one talks about everyone getting ready for the show with
the electricity lights.
- The second one talk about how everyone is amazed by the light
and how everything is behaving around them.
- The last stanza is describing the feeling of the people while
heading back to their home.
Similes in the poem
• “And evening came as soft as chiffon curtains”
Chiffon curtains: These curtains are very soft and
flow along with the wind. This could mean that the
evening was calm and that there was no wind so in
other words, the weather was good and it was the
perfect evening to show to the people the electric lights.
The author did this in order to emphasize that the experience of this
night was amazing and the weather was perfect.
Furthermore, the words “closing, closing” at the end of the sentence
meant that the night was coming very slowly and this suggest that
people were bored of waiting as when you’re bored time goes by slowly
and people had been camping earlier in the afternoon just to see these
lights.
Language
• Language
The vocabulary choice of the writer is important on the way he is
describing his/ her environment. The writer describes the surroundings
with detail and aspects of every single object around. Not only the
animals had human description, but objects also had, like the cable or the
bamboo. The writer is also talking about the way how people behave and
how they are affected from it. The poem might not be as exciting when
seeing electric light, but if you think back then, when everyone had oil
lamp and seeing their emotions, it would be surprising.
Images
• Images/Meaning
The birds and the fish have been given human feelings for an
object. They are excited and impatient just about an object that is
untouchable. Electric light.