Within the blues there is a conscious use of the poetic
devices that have been for centuries part of the English
poetic tradition. Although the idea of a blues verse may
be relatively simple the language which expresses it has
often a marked sophistication. The directness and im-
mediacy of the experience is heightened with an imagery
and a symbolism that is itself drawn from the reality of
the life. It is a poetic idiom that finds its images in the
cabins and the tenements, in the fields, the empty roads,
and the crowded streets of American Negro life.

The simile, the direct comparison, is used often in
blues verses. One of the earliest lines, used in blues in
every part of the South, was the well known,

"My woman has a heart like a stone cast in
the sea . . ."

A line still used in Mississippi and Tennessee is the
vivid,

"Put your arms around me like the circle
'round the sun . ."

The singer who first compared the "circle 'round the
sun" with the warmth and the intensity of an embrace
found his comparison in the sun over his head as he stood
in the summer fields, just as Blind Lemon Jefferson, in
describing a woman, found his comparison in the move-
ments of a squirrels in the brush along the stream beds
in Texas where he had been raised,

"She's a fair made woman, cunning as a
squirrel . ."

The metaphor, the indirect comparison, is less often
used, but it still is found in many blues. Big Joe Williams
sings,

Before I be your dog, before I be your dog,

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