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Popular Culture Review
begs him “to bestir your dark copper limbs,” and then describes his plight in
cosmic terms. This “dreaming ball-player” is addressed as a “skillful
manipulator of a million glittering spheres” that he can throw “over the edge of
infinity.” A juggler and “a drinker of the warm ^\4lite milk of space” as well, the
Negro ballplayer needs to ‘Svake up.” The last line of “Dark Arm” claims to end
the reader’s suspense but is packed with crafty hyperbole—’’Heaven is full of
the sound of shattering glass” (88). Retrospectively, the heroic tone here borders
on the mock heroic as Williams’s conclusion both canonizes the enormous