Time-Travel (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Sharon Olds
- First Published: 1980
- Type of Work: Poem
- Genres: Poetry
- Subjects: Family or family life, United States or Americans, Mothers, Parents and children, Brothers and sisters, Fathers
“Time-Travel” is a good introduction to Olds's use of themes concerning her painful past. The title and the poem's first sentence explain what is happening. The speaker says she has learned to return to the past in order to find doors and windows. The meaning of those apertures is made clear at the poem's end, but the reader recognizes them already as typical means of enlarging one's view or of escaping.
The next lines place the poem in time—a hot summer day in 1955. The setting seems to be a lake house, perhaps a vacation cabin, for it has pine walls and a splintery pine...
[The entire page is 797 words long]
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