The poem The Street by Robert Pinsky presents the street as a universal experimenter and observer, which functions as an observer of the luxury of rich people and suffering of poor people throughout the history. The street in its observation is neutral and disinterested. It does not take side of any of the rich or the poor.

      “Troubles”, “fights”, “sickness” are for poor people and likewise “underwear” or “dirty pajamas” are other images to show the poverty of the poor people that are not for fully dressed rich people. The poet also narrates the event through the eighth stanza, where a rich man is eloping with the wife of poor man in his “car”. All the cars are like dragon for this poor man and throw his shoes to the car. The street is storing all these events in the memory but its observation is only passive.
      The poet towards the end of the poem seems to be obsessed with the idea of death. In his description of death it is represented as neutral, indifferent or disinterested. All rich or poor, white or black are equal in the eye of death. There is neither superior nor inferior, morality is inevitable. Ultimately we can see this poem is generally about the life and death which are the parts of street. It is journey from life to death; in between we face or experience different kinds of things. All civilizations, power makers, rulers, ruled are toys in front of the death. “The Street” is medium through which we experience all the things.
      In this poem neutrality of death is associated to the neutrality of street. Death is great equalizer force that equates both poor and rich, black and white. It is observing man’s exploitation upon man from the past to the present and conveys the message. Though, civilization and the mode of system develops or changes, the exploitation upon poor never changes, and ultimately poor remains poor forever because of the capitalistic mode of oppression.

The Street - Poem by Robert Pinsky

Streaked and fretted with effort, the thick
Vine of the world, red nervelets
Coiled at its tips.

All roads lead from it. All night
Wainwrights and upholsterers work finishing
The wheeled coffin

Of the dead favorite of the Emperor,
The Child’s corpse propped seated
On brocade, with yellow

Oiled curls, kohl on the stiff lids.
Slaves throw petals on the roadway
For the cortege, white

Languid flowers shooting from dark
Blisters on the vine, ramifying
Into streets. On mine,

Rockwell Avenue, it was embarrassing:
Trouble-fights, the police, sickness-
Seemed never to come

For anyone when they were fully dressed.
It was always underwear or dirty pyjamas,
Unseemly stretches

Of skin showing through a torn housecoat.
Once a stranger drove off in a car
With somebody’s wife,

And he ran after them in his undershirt
And threw his shoe at the car. It bounced
Into the street

Harmlessly, and we carried it back to him;
But the-man had too much dignity
To put it back on,

So he held it and stood crying in the street:
“He’s breaking up my home,” he said,
“The son of a bitch
Bastard is breaking up my home.” The street
Rose undulant in pavement-breaking coils
And the man rode it,

Still holding his shoe and stiffly upright
Like a trick rider in the circus parade
That came down the street

Each August. As the powerful dragonlike
Hump swelled he rose cursing and ready
To throw his hoe – woven

Angular as a twig into the fabulous
Rug or brocade with crowns and camels,
Leopards and rosettes,

All riding the vegetable wave of the street
From the John Flock Mortuary Home
Down to the river.

It was a small place, and off the center,
But so much a place to itself, I felt
Like a young prince

Or aspirant squire. I knew that Ivanhoe
Was about race. The Saxons were Jews,
Or even Coloreds,

With their low-ceilinged, unbelievably
Sour-smelling houses down by the docks.
Everything was written

Or woven, ivory and pink and emerald –
Nothing was too ugly or petty or terrible
To be weighed in the immense

Silver scales of the dead: the looming
Balances set right onto the live, dangerous
Gray bark of the street.