Analysis Of Scrubbing Up Dust

In “Scrubbing Up Dust”, Billie Jo sees a boy, Jim Martin, scrubbing dust. As she walks home, she realizes that her house is a mess and she thinks about what her mom would have done and how the job now falls to her since her mom is dead. In the poem there was a hyperbole declares that the cleaning is, “knuckle-breaking work” (110. Hesse) and her hands aren’t meant for that. There was a simile in the poem stating that her mom would “break that mud like the farmers break sod” (109). On page 110 there is a tone change when she signals the word “but.” This is shown in the quote when Billie Jo states, “It isn’t the work I hate, the knuckle-breaking work of beating mud out of every blessed thing, but every day my fingers ache so bad.” (110) This shows
how she goes from angry to sad. She is saying how she can’t do the work she was meant to do. The title is both literal and figurative because she is talking about how she should scrub up dust and her mom scrubbing up dust. It is also figurative because scrubbing the dust could also mean that while scrubbing the dust, she could return her hope and if she didn’t scrub up the dust then she wouldn’t have any hope left. When she states, “I should just let them rest, let the dust rest, let the world rest.” (110), it makes the figurative meaning of the title make sense because it shows how if she didn’t scrub the dust then she could leave the world behind and just be unhopeful about her future. This poem teaches you that you should never leave someone behind and always fulfill the responsibilities they would want you to do.