The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam, the mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work . . who is speaking in the excerpt from “i hear america singing” by walt whitman?

A narrator

In these lines, Whitman describes the sounds of America. He tells us how all workers and laborers, men and women, sing while they work. The poem is told by a narrator who is simply an observer, and is not participating in the action. This is why the poem is told from the third-person point of view.

i can you there : )

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serve the people! ,” smoothly translated by julia lovell, offers an initial sample of yan lianke’s writing to an english-speaking audience. a bluntly drawn, mildly erotic fable, it teases mao zedong by poking fun at a true believer who obeys the chairman’s precepts too literally. to a western sensibility, the broad strokes of yan lianke’s humor would seem to pose little risk of inciting rebellion, whether of the flesh or of the body politic. but then, part of the book’s attraction is that it doesn’t have a western sensibility. it lets the reader see — or rather, intuit — what jokes chinese officials don’t consider funny, and how very little it takes for a writer to be branded an incendiary in 21st-century china, more than three decades after the death of mao, a decade after the death of deng xiaoping and seven years since china entered the world trade organization, a move that would seem to signal a willingness (however wary) to mingle with the rest of the world.