Chapter 12
Journeys (p. 1109)
ROADS TAKEN: POEMS BY ROBERT FROST (p. 1111)
ROBERT FROST
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening (p. 1111)
Because “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” has been widely anthologized, it
is likely that college students have encountered it before and been told that its theme
deals with death. We might remind students at this point that Making Literature Mat-
ter suggests finding a theme rather than the theme of a text. Instructors might locate
the interpretation done by Herbert R. Coursen Jr. in which he satirically “proves” that
the speaker is Santa Claus, delayed on the way to deliver Christmas presents. Having
made the point that we do not take a New Critical approach, however, we must admit
that the cliché that life is a journey ending in death does seem to drive Frost’s poem to
a great extent. We might suggest a Marxist reading, nevertheless. The speaker is con-
cerned that he has stopped on property that belongs to an owner who lives “in the vil-
lage” and who might object to his trespassing. Nature, though beautiful, does not be-
long to the speaker, and his idleness in stopping work to enjoy it challenges the capi-
talistic rule that his own labor does not belong to him either. The “miles to go” are an
obligation that takes over his life and steals beauty, and presumably art, from him,
making it a guilty pleasure, at best.
connotations of the words. The effect is that the reader’s body responds and feels
almost as if it has been transported into the world of the poem. The pause after this
image at the end of the penultimate stanza tempts the reader to remain in the woods,
as the speaker’s desire seems to be. The characterization of the woods as “lovely, dark
and deep” is often taken to mean that the speaker wishes (to borrow the words of
ROBERT FROST
The Road Not Taken (p. 1113)
Like the previous poem by the same author, Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”
may be a poem for which students think they know the one, definitive, correct inter-
pretation. Many see the poem as having a message for their lives, as college students
about to choose paths to their careers. It is our job as instructors to disabuse them of
this simplistic assumption. Invite them to find critical essays about the poem and to
bring to class an interpretation that they find surprising. Critics have pointed out in-
consistencies that contradict the usual notion that the speaker has chosen the uncon-
ventional path, noting that both forks of the road are characterized as being “just as
fair” and “really about the same” in the same poem that describes one as “less traveled
by.” It is significant that the title of the poem includes the negative word not. The po-
em seems to be not about choosing the right path but about something that is lost by
the same attitude a few decades later, characterizing their boldly chosen individualism
as old-fashioned and conforming. Some critics would point out that as part of a given
society, our decisions are influenced by social constructions of reality we take for
granted. We would like to take Frost’s poem as a celebration of nonconformity, but
this interpretation may itself conform to convention, undercutting its validity. The sigh
of the speaker at the poem’s end may reflect the reality that every decision involves
loss.
The mood of the speaker in both “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and
“The Road Not Taken” is conflicted. The poems describe decisions made about
ROBERT FROST
Acquainted with the Night (p. 1114)
An issue of repetition arises in this poem by Robert Frost. The parallel structure of
most of its sentences seems like an incantation, a ritual. The speaker describes ongo-
ing action: he or she does not take a one-time walk at night but has long familiarity
with night, as the form of the verbs implies. The rhyme scheme, too, is ongoing, tak-
ing us from one stanza to the next with its repeating sounds. The form is terza rima, a
structure invented by Dante, in which the rhyme scheme interlocks in succeeding
tercets (three-line stanzas). Frost turns the poem into a sonnet by ending with a rhym-
explain” his perambulations. Neither does he attempt to explain them to the reader,
perhaps because the action is its own thing, something that would lose its power if
explained. Although the cry in the night seems unrelated to the speaker, it brings the
action of the speaker and the poem itself to a brief halt as we listen and wonder about
its significance. The word But at the beginning of the following stanza links clauses of
a sentence, turning our attention away from the “interrupted cry” and back to the
solitary speaker. Neither the watchman, the voice in the night, nor the clock
proclaiming the time penetrates the isolation of this traveler in the night. The cry,
however, suits the mood of the poem; submerged emotional intensity is implied in the
repeated walking, the obsessive pacing, of the person we encounter here.
A Greek word sometimes used in rhetoric is kairos. Unlike chronos, which
indicates the passing of time as we usually think of it (hence the word chronological),
kairos refers to a fleeting moment when a word or an action can hit its precise target.
The clock cannot measure this sort of time, so the walker continues unaffected.
ROBERT FROST
Birches (p. 1115)
Critics often read Robert Frost’s “Birches” as a balancing act between reality and fanta-
sy. On the one hand, Frost describes the “Truth” of the birch trees’ bends: the ice
storms that weigh the trees down on “a sunny winter morning / After a rain.” On the
other hand, Frost soon leaves that “Truth” behind to speculate about “some boy” who
lives in the woods and swings on those trees, bending them down to create arcs. This
imagined boy, Frost muses, learns about not “launching out too soon” so as to maxim-
ize his ride. As a possible metaphor for his life, this question of “launching out” speaks
to not only life decisions but also death. The poet says that while he’d like to “get away
from earth awhile,” he wouldn’t want fate to “willfully misunderstand” and “snatch
[him] away / Not to return.”
Toward the end of the poem, readers come across several stanzas full of memories:
“So was I once myself a swinger of birches,” it begins. The poem also mentions a “path-
less wood,” which we might interpret as difficult to navigate, being without clear roads
VISIONARY JOURNEYS: POEMS (p. 1118)
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
Kubla Khan (p. 1118)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of the best known Romantic poets, wrote the haunting-
ly beautiful “Kubla Khan” upon waking from an opium dream. The poem uses char-
acteristically rich imagery, such as “gardens bright with sinuous rills” and “sunny spots
of greenery,” to depict the emperor Kubla Khan’s palace or “pleasure dome.” But this
fantastical palace is contrasted throughout with the grandeur and force of nature. With
the phrase “A savage place!” Coleridge describes the deep chasm or canyon through
which the river, Alph, flows. This “savage place” is otherworldly, being haunted by a
“woman wailing for her demon-lover.” For Coleridge, this is a tumultuous, even
frightening, environment, where the earth breathed in “fast thick pants” and “huge
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Ozymandias (p. 1120)
“Ozymandias,” written by Percy Bysshe Shelley after a visit to the British Museum,
describes a traveler who came upon the broken statue of a distant king “half sunk” in
the desert. The traveler reports this statue’s existence to the poem’s narrator, observing
that the piece’s sculptor was skilled enough to capture the “shattered visage” of the
long-dead King Ozymandias (including his frown and his “sneer of cold command”).
The worn statue is all that remains in this vast and lonely desert environment. But “its
sculptor well those passions read / Which yet survive,” the traveler recounts, implying
that a good sculptor, like a good poet, is able to identify and recreate life, “stamp[ing]”
passions “on these lifeless things.” Not unlike the poet/creator in Coleridge’s “Kubla
Khan,” the sculptor here demonstrates significant creative power.
Written in sonnet form, the poem contains fourteen lines total, with a division of
sorts between the first eight and last six lines. Although the first eight set up the
situation and describe the statue’s features, the last six are more focused on the words
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Sailing to Byzantium (p. 1122)
Published in his 1928 collection The Tower, William Butler Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzan-
tium” contends with the struggles of growing old in a young man’s land. In writing
that this “is no country for old men,” the poem suggests that only the young can thrive
there, “[c]aught in that sensual music” of youthful, natural life. Comparing old men
to “[m]onuments of unageing intellect,” Yeats implies that although our bodies may
wither, our minds or intellects remain hungry and stalwart. The narrator’s solution to
MYTHIC JOURNEYS: POEMS (p. 1124)
ALFRED LORD TENNYSON
Ulysses (p. 1124)
In this monologue by Ulysses, penned by Alfred Lord Tennyson, we see Ulysses as a
proud, adventurous, and heroic soul. He’d rather be moving through the world than
settled like an “idle king” and proclaims, “[h]ow dull is it to pause, to make an end.”
Like Yeats’s narrator in “Ozymandias,” Ulysses knows that, having lived a full and var-
ied life, he is no longer at his full strength: “[Y]ou and I are old,” he writes, but
“[s]ome work of noble note, may yet be done.” Travel is depicted as a way to live out
one’s life meaningfully. Though “weak by time and fate,” Ulysses describes himself
and his compatriots as “strong in will.” He is confident, almost prideful, claiming that
he “has become a name” for those who wander the earth. “[A]lways roaming with a
hungry heart,” he is never satisfied, never content; fulfillment, for him, means contin-
uing to engage heroically with the world.
ADRIENNE RICH
Diving into the Wreck (p. 1127)
Adrienne Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck” is widely read as a metaphorical journey to
discover the often-unwritten place of women in human history. Before actually “div-
ing into the wreck,” Rich’s narrator reads “the book of myths,” “load[s] the camera,”
and “check[s] the edge of the knife-blade.” She puts on her wet suit and mask, de-
scribed here as “body-armor,” and proceeds down the boat’s ladder. Readers might
make special note of her mention of the knife-blade, for although divers typically bring
knives for security reasons, in this metaphorical exploration the narrator is also defend-
ing herself from an unfriendly world and an alien history. She doesn’t mention an
A JOURNEY TO DEATH: POEMS (p. 1131)
MARY OLIVER
When Death Comes (p. 1131)
As the speaker in Mary Oliver’s “When Death Comes” contemplates the journey of
death, her main concern is that she enter into it undefeated and filled with life. She
wants to avoid dying with her life unlived and wants instead to be “particular, and re-
al.” A skilled poet who teaches creative writing, Oliver is aware of the “elements of
poetry” and the other literary concepts discussed in the early chapters of our antholo-
gy, and she employs many of them in her poetry. Readers will note her use of sensory
imagery, repetition, evocative diction, and carefully constructed syntax. The opening
lines of the poem, for example, use repetition and parallel structure, repeating the
phrase “when death comes” to imply an ongoing connection between the array of di-
verse similes. A similar technique is used near the end of the poem as she begins two
stanzas with “When it’s over.” These repeating lines may imply stream of conscious-
ness, but they also give the poem a sermonic, prophetic quality and emphasize the
inevitability of death.
Readers will notice the similes in the early stanzas. Death is first characterized as
a “hungry bear”; the image is primitive and scary—something inexorable, powerful,
and elemental that we can’t outrun. Another simile captures the coldness of the grave:
“an iceberg between the shoulder blades.” Most vivid might be the personification of
JOHN DONNE
Death Be Not Proud (p. 1133)
An Anglican priest who was a contemporary of William Shakespeare, John Donne
wrote sermons, satires, and a great many highly original poems. His major themes are
religion, love, and death. His Holy Sonnets, considered his most skilled work, reflect
these concerns. Like many of Donne’s poems, “Death Be Not Proud” personifies an
abstract concept, death, in the kind of extended metaphor called a conceit. The sonnet
is constructed as a rhetorical argument, a refutation of the power of death. Addressing
death directly, the speaker summons his evidence with an analogy comparing death to
rest and sleep, something that human beings welcome. What’s more, death is the final
agent of the soul’s delivery, its deliverance to God or perhaps its final rebirth. He goes
on to characterize death as a mere tool of other powers and ends his argument with
the paradox that because the Christian wakes to eternal life, death itself will die.
In many of his poems, Donne has his speaker address someone or something in a
dramatic monologue that readers are expected to imagine overhearing. The situation
is much like a formal debate in which the opponents each seek to persuade not each
other but a listening audience. Donne, as both a clergyman and a member of
Parliament, would have been familiar with both direct and indirect ways of swaying an
audience. He uses an Aristotelian argument that seeks to prove the opposition
completely in the wrong. Because it is impossible to present an argument without
revealing something of oneself, the speaker shows that he is proud of his defiance of
death. His tone is mocking, almost jeering in its sarcasm. Perhaps its strong language
is merely bravado, a cover for fear. Or the speaker may seek out death, taunting him
into striking.
The poem assumes that the audience will share the speaker’s warrants about
eternal life after death. But even readers who do not believe this may relate to the
concept of death as a rest from life. The intellectuality of the speaker and his skill with
language are not consistent with naiveté, and we trust such an ethos. But considering
his argument in terms of logos, we might charge him with begging the question.
Before we can believe that death should not be proud, we must believe the doctrine
that Christ has conquered death and the grave. Donne preaches to the choir, to
people who are already inclined to believe that death is powerless.
The poem flows so well as an argument that we may not notice its Shakespearean
sonnet structure or its traditional rhyme scheme. To modern ears, the final couplet
does not rhyme, though it would have rhymed in many Elizabethan dialects. The final
line may be read with the rhythms of iambic pentameter, because it is perfectly
regular in its meter. Imagining Donne in the pulpit or in Parliament, however, we
might hear a strong voice emphasizing each syllable of the final phrase for a strong,
DYLAN THOMAS
Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night (p. 1134)
Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” is written in the highly
structured form called a villanelle. The villanelle began as a French verse form that
originally addressed trivial and lighthearted themes. Always experimental in some way,
Thomas uses it for the serious purpose of responding to his father’s death, thus trans-
forming the form and making it his own. Thomas’s dramatic readings of his poetry in
the 1950s made him an important voice in twentieth-century poetry. He plays not only
with the conventions of form but with language as well. Although “Do Not Go Gentle
into That Good Night” does not fracture syntax or use words in the unusual ways that
characterize many of his more ambiguous poems, he uses rich imagery and highly
metaphoric language to express his deep emotion as he exhorts his dying father to resist
death.
Repetition is extremely important to the effect of the poem. It is like an
incantation or perhaps like one of the Welsh sermons the poet heard in childhood. In
a villanelle, specific lines must be repeated according to a set pattern. But Thomas
employs parallelism in numerous other ways. He repeats the word rage at the
beginning of the repeating imperative sentence. It is difficult to read the line aloud
without clenching one’s fists and speaking from the gut. He parallels different sorts of
men in a sermonic fashion: “wise men,” “good men,” “wild men,” “grave men,” and
finally the particularized “you, my father.” The sermon builds rhetorically to its
strongest point. Implied comparisons and puns give the poem complex layers of
meaning. The word grave speaks of both seriousness and mortality, and the sight of
dying men is “blinding,” implying both enhanced light and the loss of it at the same
time. Students might enjoy tracing the contrasting images of light and dark in the
poem.
resist death.
Thomas goes through the list of different types of men and their failings before
revealing that the poem is a dramatic monologue to the speaker’s father. Most of us
cannot remember the first time we heard or read this poem, and its familiarity makes
it difficult to imagine the effect of leaving this information to the end. It will be
interesting to look at student responses to the question if some are reading it for the
first time. We might intuit that the impact is greater because of this technique of
seeming to address the audience in the abstract at first and then particularizing the
message. Both the tantalizing ambiguity of the poem and the technical difficulty of
writing a villanelle make this an impressive text. Attempting to write in structured
forms may be a good exercise, but a better strategy for writers may be to keep forms
like the villanelle and the sonnet in mind for use when content seems suited for them.
For most of us, putting the form first limits creativity.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA
On Death, without Exaggeration (p. 1135)
In 1996 at the age of seventy-three, a Polish woman named Wislawa Szymborska won
the Nobel Prize for her poetry. She has been called a poet of the ordinary and has said
that she aims for a style that is without artifice. Deceptively simple, her poetry often
deals with war, especially World War II. The Warsaw Ghetto and Auschwitz are part
of her personal experience, and her confrontations with mortality begin there. She
brings war down to earth with her irony. Postwar Europe is seen through the eyes of a
worker: “After every war / someone has to tidy up. / Things won’t pick themselves up,
after all,” she says in one poem. In “On Death, without Exaggeration,” she catalogs
the things that death cannot do, giving the homely art of “baking cakes” and the hu-
man quality of a sense of humor equal importance with astronomy and engineering.
And again, she tells us that it can’t “clean up after itself.” Like John Donne in “Death
Be Not Proud,” Szymborska jeers at the incompetence of a personified death.
To Szymborska, life lived in the present moment overcomes death, which always
arrives too late to steal the time we’ve already lived. Death is never retroactive. The
speaker criticizes humanity for “lending a hand” to death, but even this does not
overcome the constant regeneration of life. Like a good argument, Szymborska’s poem
gives specific examples, saving her most vivid ones for last. She grants death’s strengths
but goes on to continue her recital of its failures. Like Donne in “Death Be Not
Proud,” she ends with paradox. Just at the point of what seems its greatest victory,
death is defeated by its very nature.
the others. She sets the stage for this by saying that death “can’t take a joke,” implicitly
inviting us to laugh at death with her. Donne takes a similar tack, but a full
acceptance of his argument requires a leap of faith. Szymborska, by contrast, privileges
earthly existence. Rather than defeating death by awaking to eternal life, everyday
people defeat death just by living. Because she foregrounds everyday life and
overcomes death by persistence rather than struggle, we might recognize Szymborska
EMILY DICKINSON
Because I could not stop for Death— (p. 1137)
Unlike the fearsome taker of lives Death is often imagined to be, in this well-known
poem, Death is described as a gentleman-like figure leisurely driving a carriage toward
Eternity. The narrator, Death, and Immortality are the carriage’s only occupants, and
readers might be struck by how civilized the process seems to be. In contrast to Dylan
Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle,” Dickinson’s poem constructs death as something to
be accepted, rather than avoided. Indeed, her first line suggests the futility of such
resistance; she was too busy to “stop for Death,” so He came and got her. Rather than
something to be feared, dying is imagined here as a civilized, even courteous, progres-
sion through which the trappings of everyday life are slowly shed in favor of an eternal
life. “Labor” and “leisure,” the narrator explains, are put away. Death drives the car-
LITERATURE AND CURRENT ISSUES: DO IMMIGRANTS TAKE JOBS
FROM NATIVE-B
ORN WORKERS? (p. 1140)
JIMMY SANTIAGO BACA
So Mexicans Are Taking Jobs from Americans (p. 1141)
The title of a poem usually gives some indication of what the piece is about, and that
is certainly true for Baca’s “So Mexicans Are Taking Jobs from Americans.” Instead of
building on the premise of the title, however, Baca’s poem is crafted as a direct re-
sponse to anyone who has said those words. Baca demands to know how, exactly, the
Mexicans are physically taking the work, and why work that is given to them is so re-
ARGUMENTS ON THE ISSUE
STEVEN CAMAROTA, Unskilled Workers Lose Out to
Immigrants (p. 1143)
MARIA E. ENCHAUTEGUI, Immigrants Are Replacing,
Not Displacing, Workers (p. 1143)
TED WIDMER, The Immigration Dividend (p. 1146)
In “Unskilled Workers Lose Out to Immigrants,” Steven Camarota at the Center for
Immigration Studies uses appeals through logos, in this case statistics, to convince read-
of his use of statistics, Camarota’s personal position on the immigration issue is clear. He
writes that employment gains “have gone” to immigrants, for example, as if immigrants
are usefully distinguished from native-born workers in terms of what they deserve and as
if immigrants have been simply passive recipients of these “gains.”
In mentioning Congress and President Obama’s support for issuing work permits,
Camarota might have explained the ways in which minimizing the exploitation of
unskilled, illegal labor actually benefits the economy or pointed out the possible eco-
nomic and social benefits of keeping families together. But by neglecting to distin-
guish between working conditions for illegal and legal immigrants, Camarota reveals
his own lack of interest in determining whether the work immigrants take on is actual-
ly desirable for the native-born Americans about whom he is concerned. Underlying
his claims, then, is a marked privileging of American-born individuals over immi–
Maria E. Enchautegui, a research fellow at the Urban Institute, argues in ‘‘Immi-
grants Are Replacing, Not Displacing, Workers’’ that the Center of Immigration Stud-
ies’ claims that immigrants are taking away American-born workers’ jobs ignores that
the current U.S. workforce is far more educated now than in past years. So, as her title
suggests, immigrants are replacing a shrinking class of unskilled workers, performing
jobs for which most American-born workers are overqualified. Despite her lack of
agreement with the Center’s report, Enchautegui makes apparent from the start that
the issue is very complicated. Put another way, she shows that she comes from a posi-
tion of nuance that is open to multiple points of consideration. This makes her seem
trustworthy.
In ‘‘The Immigration Dividend,’’ Ted Widmer urges readers to think beyond the
current job-related immigration discussion and instead consider the wider picture of
immigration and its effects over time. Rightfully noting the divisive nature of immigra-
tion politics, Widmer references a time when both sides could come together in ser-
vice of equality and progress. His overall claim is that our view of the situation is too
narrow and our sense of what immigrants bring to the nation too limited in scope. He
is responding to questions about what immigrants can and should do here by explor-
ing the ways they have enriched American culture, science, industry, and so on. Per-
WARTIME JOURNEYS: STORIES (p. 1150)
AMBROSE BIERCE
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (p. 1150)
Ambrose Bierce’s short story ‘‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’’ chronicles the
journey of one Southerner, a Confederate supporter, who was executed at Owl Creek
Bridge for attempted bridge sabotage. At the start of the story, readers are given a fairly
objective description of the condemned——Peyton Farquhar’s——appearance and dress,
which makes us feel a bit like outsiders witnessing the scene. Bierce’s description
makes him seem relatively unremarkable but certainly not how you would imagine a
Union soldiers, however, gets increasingly fantastical, and as he reaches the gates of
his ‘‘bright and beautiful’’ homestead, we learn that he has indeed been executed, his
body still swinging from the bridge’s timbers.
A complex sense of time undergirds this movement between reality and illusion.
Most of the story, which includes a journey we assume takes a day or two (or more)
to complete, has actually happened in the handful of minutes in which Farquhar
waits to be executed. Time here is subjective, in that we are operating within Far-
TIM O’BRIEN
The Things They Carried (p. 1157)
In a sense, the stories in O’Brien’s collection of interrelated narratives about the Vi-
etnam War, the book The Things They Carried, are stories about stories as much as
they are stories about war. Placing this title story in a fresh context, however, invites
readers to think of its characters in terms of the journey they are making, both meta-
phorically and in actuality. Soldiers struggle with the truth and how to tell it, seeking
to find meaning in their journeys to war and back. O’Brien distinguishes between fact
and truth and insists that we must sometimes lie (perhaps to ourselves more than to
anyone else) in order to tell the truth. “Stories save us,” he believes. The slippery na-
ture of truth may especially apply to Vietnam War experiences, for conflicting politi-
cal narratives about that war have been part of our culture since the 1960s. People
is repeated again and again. It is unlikely that Jimmy Cross’s daydreams about Martha
actually cause the man’s death, but the lieutenant himself obviously takes responsibil-
ity for it. However, as we focus on this psychological aspect and then compare Cross’s
emotions with those of actual letter writers, perspectives on love begin to emerge.
Although this is a war story, the first paragraph is about Martha’s letters. The final
section of “The Things They Carried” takes us back to Jimmy Cross’s perspective,
beginning with the sentence “On the morning after Ted Lavender died, First
Lieutenant Jimmy Cross crouched at the bottom of his foxhole and burned Martha’s
letters.” In this way, O’Brien frames the events in the middle of the story, jumbled as
they are in the surreal fashion of war, with the reasoned thoughts of the protagonist. In
the opening, Cross is conscious of “pretending” that the relationship with Martha is
College students in the twenty-first century will find Martha less real than readers
of her own 1960s generation might have interpreted her. Despite the images coming
out of Woodstock and other “flower power” versions of the 1960s, many young women
expected to be seen as virgins, whether they were or not. That Jimmy Cross fantasizes
about touching Martha’s knee would have been amusing and ironic to his own
generation, but his warrants are true to the mores of the times. Ideally, the woman he
fantasizes about is the American girl next door whom most soldiers in this war wish
their girlfriends to be. As an English major reading Chaucer, perhaps Martha is not
that innocent; and readers will note the feminist implications in her admiration for
Virginia Woolf. The times they are a-changing, we might note, borrowing from a Bob
Dylan song contemporary with the Vietnam era. We should also be aware of student
protests taking place on campuses, like the one protest Martha writes about, her letters
perhaps glossing over the truth with trivia meant for Jimmy’s peace of mind. Martha
seems more of a symbol than a real college student.