The Full Text of “Between the World and Me”
The Full Text of “Between the World and Me”
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“Between the World and Me” Introduction
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The American writer Richard Wright first published "Between the World and Me" in The Partisan Review in 1935. While walking through the woods, the poem's speaker stumbles across the remains of a Black person who was brutally murdered by a racist mob. The gruesome details of the scene "thrust[]" themselves "between" the speaker and the rest of the world, creating a barrier of intense, icy fear. As the poem goes on, the speaker becomes the victim himself, narrating the murder from a first-person perspective that viscerally illustrates the dehumanizing horror of racist violence. The contemporary writer Ta-Nehisi Coates borrowed the poem's title for his bestselling nonfiction book of the same name.
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“Between the World and Me” Summary
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The speaker describes walking through the woods one morning when he suddenly came upon what he calls "the thing," in a grassy clearing surrounded by oak and elm trees. As he pieced together the details of the scene, they created a sort of barrier between the speaker and his surroundings.
There was an abandoned pile of white bones sleeping on a pillow of ashes, and the burnt stump of a small tree pointed into the air like a finger accusing the sky of something. There were broken tree branches, the stems of burnt leaves, and the seared loop of an oily rope. There was a shoe with no foot to go in it, a necktie with no neck to go around, a shirt that had been torn, a hat without a head to sit on, and a pair of pants crusty with dried blood. On top of the grass, which had been flattened by all the feet standing on it, there were buttons, used-up matches, cigar and cigarette butts, peanut shells, an empty flask of gin, and a sex worker's lipstick. Bits of tar had been left behind, alongside feathers ruffling in the breeze and the scent of gasoline. The sun shone through the morning air, pouring a shock of yellow into the skull's empty eye sockets.
As the speaker stood there looking at all of this, his mind felt stunned—as if frozen—with sorrow and sympathy for the person who died. He felt as though he were stuck to the ground, while his heart was surrounded by ice-cold terror. Then the sky went dark and wind ruffled the grass and leaves. The woods filled with the howls of starving dogs, eager and bloodthirsty voices screamed in the darkness, and the people who watched this murder reappeared.
The speaker describes the victim's body then merging with his own: the bones shook to life, rising from the ground and fusing with the speaker's bones, while the victim's ashes turned into solid, black flesh that melded with the speaker's own skin. The scene appeared before the speaker, who saw the flask of gin being passed around the crowd, cigars and cigarettes burning in the dark, the sex worker putting on her red lipstick, and a thousand faces circling around him, calling for him to be burned alive.
Then the mob ripped off the speaker's clothes and brutally beat him, bashing his teeth into his throat and making him swallow his own blood. No one could hear the speaker's cries over the crowd's shouting. They fumbled with his body, Black and wet with blood, while tying him to a tree. Then boiling hot tar melted the speaker's skin, which sloughed off of his body in pieces. The quills of white feathers stabbed his tender skin, and he cried out in suffering. Then came the cool relief of gasoline, which poured over the speaker like baptismal water. Then they lit him on fire; the red flames of his body jumped toward the sky as pain surged inside him, like water boiling his arms and legs. Breathing hard and pleading, he grabbed the sides of the blazing tree like a child, helplessly clinging to the scalding sides of death itself. Now he is the pile of bones in the clearing, his face nothing but an empty skull in the yellow daylight, looking up in shock at the sun.
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“Between the World and Me” Themes
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The Horror and Inhumanity of Racist Violence
“Between the World and Me” is a poem about the immense horror and cruelty of racist violence. Upon finding the bones of a Black person who was lynched by a racist mob, the speaker envisions the intensely disturbing scene that preceded the victim’s death. The trash that litters the ground—cigarette butts, a tube of lipstick, an empty gin flask, peanut shells—reveals that spectators treated this person’s brutal murder as a form of entertainment. In juxtaposing this notion with gruesome, terrifying depictions of the victim’s final moments, the speaker illustrates the monstrous inhumanity of racism.
The scene that the speaker “stumble[s] / suddenly upon” is so horrific that it seemingly takes him a moment to even recognize what he’s seeing. He calls the pile of bones “the thing,” as if he can’t bear to acknowledge that he’s looking at the remains of a human being whose “white bones [are] slumbering forgottenly upon a cushion of ashes.”
The speaker then pieces together what happened from the items left at the scene, painting a vivid picture of a horrifically painful and gruesome murder. He mentions "trousers stiff with black blood," a “charred stump,” “scattered traces of tar,” and the “lingering smell of gasoline,” which call to mind a racist mob tar-and-feathering its victim.
So overwhelmed is the speaker by this scene that he feels himself merging with the victim, whose "bones" begin "melting themselves into" the speaker's own. He feels his own skin “falling from [him] in limp patches,” his limbs "boiling," and his teeth being "batter[ed] into his own throat." These descriptions are intentionally shocking in their brutality, and are meant to highlight the cruelty of this murder.
This makes it all the more terrifying, then, when it becomes clear that the crowd took perverse pleasure in enacting such violence. In reliving the lynching, the speaker sees glowing cigars, a flask “passed from mouth to mouth,” and a sex worker with “smeared lipstick red upon her lips” (whose presence suggests that the crowd sees this as a raucous, rowdy event). The racist mob, the poem implies, saw this person’s agony as a spectacle. They were "thirsty" for violence, "clamoring that [his] life be burned" for their entertainment.
This contrast—between the mob’s pleasure and the victim/speaker’s gruesome pain—illustrates the horror of racist violence, which strips Black people of their human dignity and treats Black life as disposable. The speaker’s empathy cuts through the mob’s monstrous cruelty, forcing readers to look at the brutal, bloodthirsty, and barbaric reality of racism head-on.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-25
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The Trauma of Racism
“Between the World and Me” not only highlights the horror and inhumanity of racist violence itself, but also shows the devastating and traumatic impact that racism has on Black people moving through society. When the speaker comes across the horrific aftermath of a lynching, the “details” of the gruesome scene come “between” him and "the world." In other words, the terrible reality of racism stands in his way, interrupting his walk in the woods and “circl[ing]” him with “icy walls of fear.” Racism, the poem thus reveals, isn’t something the speaker can just move past or ignore; instead, it “thrusts” itself onto his lived experience, denying his right to move freely and safely through the world without a very real and incapacitating sense of fear.
The speaker obviously doesn’t go out looking for this scene, but he can’t ignore it after he stumbles upon it. This presents racism as an extremely unwelcome intruder, one that forces itself upon the speaker. “And the sooty details of the scene rose,” he says, “thrusting / themselves between the world and me.” The word “thrusting” spotlights the intrusive way that the sight of this racist violence inundates the speaker, making him feel like he can’t escape.
As much as he might like to, the speaker can’t look away from the pile of bones and the “charred” surroundings. He stands “frozen” in this scene, stopped in his tracks by the unavoidable reality that has shoved its way between him and everything else, forcing him to reckon with the deeply troubling fact that the world is “clamoring that” Black people “be burned.”
With this in mind, the speaker starts to feel the victim’s bones “melting themselves” into his bones, an image that shows the connection he feels with this victim. Suddenly the speaker becomes the victim, narrating the violence as if it’s happening to him in real-time. The lynching is no longer an abstract thing that happened to a stranger, but a terrible, immediate, and inescapable reality.
This melding of the speaker’s and the victim’s experiences suggests that racist violence causes a collective kind of trauma, as the victim’s pain engulfs the speaker so completely that it actually becomes his own. Racism, the poem indicates, puts Black people in a state of constant danger, creating a barrier of fear that stands “between” them and the world.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-25
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Between the World and Me”
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Lines 1-3
And one morning ...
... world and me...The speaker begins as if in mid-sentence. Beginning with the word "and" throws readers right into the scene in an abrupt, almost startling way that reflects the speaker's own surprise as he "stumble[s] suddenly upon the thing." The beginning of the poem, in other words, plunges readers into the scene in the same way that the speaker unwittingly finds himself staring at something unexpected in the middle of the woods.
But it's not yet clear what, exactly, this "thing" is that the speaker has found. Readers only know that this thing is in a "grassy clearing guarded by scaly oaks and elms"—that is to say, a secluded place outside the public eye. This gives the poem's atmosphere an ominous quality, as if the speaker has come across something hidden and sinister.
The fact that the speaker calls whatever he's looking at "the thing" doesn't necessarily mean he doesn't know what it is. Instead, this vague description hints that whatever he's come across is so startling that he hasn't quite wrapped his head around it yet. He's looking at something deeply troubling—so troubling, in fact, that he can't bring himself to fully recognize it or even name it in the poem itself.
Readers will later learn that the speaker has come across the scene of a lynching, where a racist mob tar-and-feathered a Black man before burning him alive. Given the shockingly gruesome nature of this crime, it makes sense that the speaker is hesitant—or even unable—to quickly come to terms with what he's seeing.
And yet, he can't keep the reality of this scene at bay for very long. Soon enough, the "sooty details of the scene" jump out at him. He suggests that these "details" cut him off from the rest of the world, "thrusting themselves between" him and everything else—basically overwhelming him so intensely that it's impossible for him to look away, keep walking, or really do anything other than take in the horrific reality of this violence. The word "thrusting" is especially telling here, as it presents racist violence as an intrusive, unrelenting force, something that essentially assaults the unprepared speaker.
There's quite a bit of alliteration and assonance in these opening lines. Note, for example, all the /w/, /s/, /g/, /uh/, and /ee/ sounds:
And one morning while in the woods I stumbled suddenly upon the thing,
Stumbled upon it in a grassy clearing guarded by scaly oaks and elms.
And the sooty details of the scene rose, thrusting themselves between the world and me...These devices add emphasis to the speaker's words, elevating the language in a way that immediately snaps readers to attention. This heightened poetic sound thus draws readers into the poem, pushing them into the scene with the same kind of abruptness that the speaker himself experiences when he suddenly stumbles upon the corpse.
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Lines 4-6
There was a ...
... of greasy hemp; -
Lines 7-9
A vacant shoe, ...
... smell of gasoline. -
Lines 10-12
And through the ...
... walls of fear— -
Lines 13-15
The sun died ...
... into my flesh. -
Lines 16-17
The gin-flask passed ...
... life be burned... -
Lines 18-21
And then they ...
... in my agony. -
Lines 22-25
Then my blood ...
... at the sun...
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“Between the World and Me” Symbols
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Empty Clothing
The empty clothing in the poem represents the victim's absence from the world. Each item the speaker comes across speaks to the fact that this person is gone. For example, the speaker doesn't just mention the victim's shoe, but specifically calls it a "vacant shoe"; there's no foot there to fill it. Similarly, he notices an "empty tie" and a "lonely hat," all things that now seem incomplete and meaningless without their owner. There presence testifies to the fact that a life has been needlessly ripped away from the earth.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Line 7: “A vacant shoe, an empty tie, a ripped shirt, a lonely hat, and a pair of trousers stiff with black blood.”
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The Crowd's Possessions
All the things that members of this mob bring to the lynching represent their perverse appetite for violence. The speaker sees peanut shells, people passing a "gin-flask [...] from mouth to mouth," the glow of cigarettes, and a sex worker "smear[ing] the lipstick red upon her lips." Notice how many of these things are items to be consumed—to drink, inhale, or eat. All these items imply that violence stirs these people's appetites, that it gets them excited and riled up. The crowd is as "hungry" for violence, like those "hounds" that the speaker hears "yelping" in the woods.
Also note how the "lipstick" here is "red"—not coincidentally, the color of blood. It represents the mob's blood-lust, the terrible "thirst[]" in their "voices" while "clamoring that [the speaker/victim's] life be burned."
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Line 8: “butt-ends of cigars and cigarettes, peanut shells, a drained gin-flask, and a whore's lipstick;”
- Line 16: “The gin-flask passed from mouth to mouth, cigars and cigarettes glowed, the whore smeared the lipstick red upon her lips,”
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“Between the World and Me” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Imagery
The speaker uses intense imagery from start to finish, making the brutal murder horrifyingly visceral and immediate for readers. The stark, intense imagery emphasizes the horror of the racist violence depicted in the poem.
The poem starts with the speaker describing a seemingly peaceful "grassy clearing" on a sunny morning, making what comes next feel all the more shocking and horrible—like some perversion of this fresh, natural world. The speaker notes the "design of white bones" on "a cushion of ashes," for example, the "charred stump of a sapling," the "torn tree limbs," the "tiny veins of burnt leaves," and "a scorched coil of greasy hemp." Readers can immediately envision the remnants of a great fire and tell that something terrible has happened here.
The speaker evokes the scents of the scene as well, noting the toxic, "lingering smell of gasoline" that hangs in the morning air. The frank description of torn, bloody clothes and a crowd's trash helps the reader piece together the scene just as the speaker does—one of horrible torture turned into entertainment.
Other bone-chilling details make it easier for readers to really feel the speaker's fear. As the scene of the lynching overwhelms him, the sun suddenly goes dark and a "night wind mutter[s] in the grass and fumble[s] the leaves in the trees." The speaker describes not just the rustling sound of leaves but also the "hungry yelping of hounds" in the distance and "thirsty voices" that yell out from the surrounding "darkness."
As the poem goes on, the details get more and more gruesome and disturbing. Feeling his own body merge with that of the victim, the speaker says, "And my skin clung to the bubbling hot tar, falling from me in limp patches." The idea of skin fusing with "bubbling hot tar" is truly awful and sickening, as is the image of that skin falling off a person in "limp patches."
These excruciating descriptions are so intense that readers can almost understand why the speaker would experience relief when the mob pours gasoline on him—this, at least, "cool[s]" him down for a moment. But then the mob lights him on fire and his body goes up in a "blaze of red": another instance of visual imagery that makes it impossible for readers to overlook the speaker's staggering pain and trauma.
Where imagery appears in the poem:- Line 2
- Lines 4-10
- Lines 11-17
- Lines 18-25
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Juxtaposition
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Personification
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Metaphor
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Parallelism
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Asyndeton
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End-Stopped Line
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Alliteration
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Consonance
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Sibilance
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Assonance
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Repetition
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Diacope
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"Between the World and Me" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Scaly
- Sooty
- Sapling
- Blunt
- Veins
- Scorched
- Coil
- Vacant
- Trousers
- Gin-Flask
- Lingering
- Fumbled
- Clamoring
- Down and Quills
- Baptism
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(Location in poem: Line 2: “scaly”)
The word "scaly" usually describes something covered in scales. Here, though, the speaker seems to use it to describe the dry bark of oak and elm trees.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Between the World and Me”
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Form
"Between the World and Me" is a 25-line poem broken into three stanzas of varying length. The poem doesn't follow a set form or structure. The lines themselves fluctuate in length, though all of them are pretty long—so long, in fact, that some of them feel like little paragraphs in and of themselves. This allows the speaker to stretch out his descriptions, especially in stanza 2, when he describes in vivid detail everything he sees in the clearing.
Overall, the lack of a consistent form gives the speaker space to control the pacing of the poem. Instead of following a rigid pattern, the poem feels unpredictable and unconfined, thus keeping readers on their toes in the same way that the speaker himself becomes suddenly alert to his disturbing surroundings when he walks into the clearing.
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Meter
"Between the World and Me" is written in free verse, which means it doesn't follow a specific metrical pattern (or rhyme scheme, for that matter). Instead, the lines all fluctuate in length and contain loose, wide-ranging rhythms. Consider, for example, the variation between lines 16 and 17:
The gin-flask passed from mouth to mouth, cigars and cigarettes glowed, the whore smeared the lipstick red upon her lips,
And a thousand faces swirled around me, clamoring that my life be burned...Line 17 is long but goes by at a fast clip, as the speaker quickly lists off descriptions of the mob. There's no metrical consistency here, but sonic devices like assonance and sibilance ("gin-flask passed") add a certain intensity to the line. In comparison, the next line feels noticeably shorter, and this kind of fluctuation helps to propel readers from line to line.
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Rhyme Scheme
"Between the World and Me" doesn't follow a rhyme scheme. One reason for this could be that it almost functions as a prose poem, since the lines are so long. In any case, the lack of rhyme scheme means the speaker isn't tied to a rigid structure, making it easier to let the language develop and unfold naturally.
The lack of rhyme in the poem doesn't mean the speaker's language isn't poetic. It's just that the speaker uses sonic devices like assonance and consonance instead of rhymes to add intensity to his words, staying away from an obvious rhyming pattern that might make the poem feel too simple or song-like—effects that might work against the fact that this is a very serious, disturbing poem.
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“Between the World and Me” Speaker
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The speaker of "Between the World and Me" is a Black man taking a walk in the woods one morning who comes across the site of a lynching. The speaker feels overwhelmed by the details of this horrific scene—so overwhelmed, in fact, that he actually becomes the victim himself, going on to narrate the lynching from a first-person point of view.
The speaker feels the horrific trauma of this lynching on a deeply personal level, which speaks to the idea that racist violence doesn't just affect its direct victims. The fact that the speaker feels the "details of the scene" as a kind of barrier between himself and the world, in turn, suggests that racism breeds a kind of terrible trauma and fear that affects the way Black people move through society.
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“Between the World and Me” Setting
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The poem takes place in a "clearing" in the woods on a sunny morning, where the speaker happens to come upon the scene of a lynching. The natural environment is peaceful and serene, leading to a sense of juxtaposition between nature's beauty and the horror of this racist violence. Sunlight filters through the victim's skull, the "morning air" smells like gasoline, and the "trampled" grass is littered with things like a "gin-flask" and cigarette butts. In short, this otherwise calm, soothing setting is overshadowed by ugly signs of violence.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Between the World and Me”
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Literary Context
Richard Wright published "Between the World and Me" in 1935, just three years before the publication of his first book, Uncle Tom's Children—a collection of short stories that explore the Black experience during the Jim Crow era. "Big Boy Leaves Home," which is the first story in this collection, has some thematic overlap with "Between the World and Me," since it culminates in a racist mob tar-and-feathering a young Black man before burning him alive.
It was also around this time that Wright began making a name for himself as a writer, especially when he won the Story Magazine prize in 1938 for his story "Fire and Cloud" (also included in Uncle Tom's Children). In this period, he wrote for a communist newspaper called The Daily Worker, where he covered a wide range of topics and often focused on the predominantly Black neighborhood of Harlem in New York City.
Wright's work is often discussed alongside other prominent Black American authors writing about race and racism in the United States in the early to mid-1900s, including Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Zora Neale Hurston (among many others). Wright's own work has had a lasting impact. In fact, the contemporary writer Ta-Nehisi Coates named his epistolary work of nonfiction, Between the World and Me, after Wright's poem of the same name. Published in 2015, it won the National Book Award for nonfiction.
Historical Context
"Between the World and Me" depicts a lynching, or a public murder in which a mob kills an individual (often by hanging, though not always). From the late 18th century all the way up to the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, this was a disturbingly common practice in the United States—particularly the South, where Wright spent the first 19 years of his life. These lynchings predominantly (though not exclusively) targeted Black people. (This was especially the case in the years during and after the Civil War, when racist mobs viciously persecuted formerly enslaved Black people.)
Lynching was a pointedly public kind of violence. These weren't covert, mysterious murders, but big public affairs that were often treated like entertainment spectacles. Lynching photography even became a gruesome new genre, as racist mobs would pose with the victim's lifeless body. There were also lynching postcards that usually featured a drawing or photograph of a specific lynching and were often accompanied by racist poems. These were sold as souvenirs, emphasizing the casual and voyeuristic attitudes surrounding such extreme acts of racist violence.
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More “Between the World and Me” Resources
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External Resources
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Hear the Poem — Listen to a reading of the poem.
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Original Publication — Take a look at a digital version of the Partisan Review issue in which the poem was first published ("Between the World and Me" begins on page 18).
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The Poet's Life — Learn more about Richard Wright in this overview of his life and work.
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Lynching in the United States — A short video that unpacks the racist history of lynching in the United States. (Please beware that this video contains disturbing photographs of actual lynchings.)
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"Between the World and Me" by Ta-Nehisi Coates — Check out the LitCharts guide to Ta-Nehisi Coates's book of the same, which borrows its title and epigraph from Richard Wright's poem.
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