The Brief Journey West (Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Howard Nemerov
- First Published: 1950
- Type of Work: Meditation
- Genres: Poetry, Meditation
- Subjects: History, United States or Americans, Parents and children, Voyages, Fathers, Old age or elderly people, Frontier or pioneer life, Aging
The Poem
“The Brief Journey West” is a meditative poem of twenty-eight lines divided into seven stanzas. The title suggests not only a particular journey, but a frontier push and, most important, the brevity of human life. The iambic pentameter of the poem gives it a formal, almost elegiac quality, which suits the subject of aging and death.
Written in the third person, the poem features an omniscient speaker with the stately quality of a court storyteller, an Anglo-Saxon “scop,” or bard. The “fathers” of the poem represent the fathers of any nation,...
[The entire page is 1510 words long]
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