Bastille Day (symbol)
July 14th, or French National Day, corresponds to the French Nationalist' storming of the Bastille in Paris during the Revolution in 1789. While the fact that Holiday died three days following Bastille Day is coincidental, the speaker's choice to mention this day is not. By calling attention to the significance of this day in relation to her death, the speaker draws a parallel between the violence that instigated France's liberation from the tyrannic rule of Louis XVI and Holiday's struggle with addiction to the freedom death provided.
Heat (motif)
New York City's hot, muggy summer weather corresponds to the emotional resonance of Holiday's death. When the speaker reads the headline, he mentions that he "sweating a lot by now" before recounting the memory of Holiday's show.
French Culture (motif)
Elements of francophone culture appear throughout "The Day Lady Died." First, Bastille Day in the first stanza, then the French authors and poets in stanza three, and finally the cigarette brands in stanza four.
Literary Publications
The speaker mentions two literary publications—New World Writing and the New York Post—which drastically differ in the kind of work they publish. While these two publications function literally in the poem, they represent the variety of knowledge available to the speaker, and the metropolis environment of New York City.
motion
Throughout the poem, the speaker is always "walking" or "going" somewhere, until the news of Holiday's death stops him in his tracks. Holiday's fame also suggests a kind of ceaseless motion: the demands and pressures of stardom, and the struggle to stay afloat in the midst of this pressure, often required sedation in the forms of drugs and alcohol. The timelessness and stasis of the speaker's memory evoke a moment a moment of pause and stasis, a luxury rarely encountered in New York City.
