"A Poem for My Librarian, Mrs. Long," Vocabulary from the poem

A situation can also be a "complex or critical or unusual difficulty." This could describe the political situation that the poet was growing up in: a racially segregated South of the 1940s. But the overall mood of the poem is childlike and cheerful, which makes the adult awareness more painful in contrast.

The given definition is for the word as an adjective, but the example sentence uses the word as a noun to refer to a small radio.

A corridor can also be "a tract of land forming a passageway through another country." This definition is a better fit, because the parenthetical description is connected to a street. The image literally describes blacks walking on Vine Street, but it could also figuratively refer to the speaker of the poem traveling to many places that are open to her through the library.

The image of a wardrobe, lions, and witches is a literary allusion to C.S. Lewis's series of fantasy novels, The Chronicles of Narnia, in which four ordinary brothers and sisters step through a piece of household furniture and become royal heroes in another land. This sense of magic and possibility is what the librarian gave to the speaker as a child; as an adult, the speaker tries to recapture and repay through this poem.