The image of driving permeates much American literature of the twentieth century. Think of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road or William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways. In these works and countless others, driving is symbolic of the quest for meaning. The act of putting hands to wheel is a metaphor for life’s journey. Driving is both a means and an end in itself, signifying the relentless passing of time. Given the country’s wide-open spaces and Americans’ love of freedom and travel, America’s infatuation with the automobile makes sense, especially for writers of prose. Driving often appears as image and theme in poetry, most surprisingly in the work of Bly, a poet most often associated with the natural world. Images of cars and driving appear in numerous Bly poems including “Three Kinds of Pleasure,” “Driving Toward the Lac Qui Parle River,” “Driving My Parents Home at Christmas,” and many others. “Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter,” one of Bly’s first “driving” poems, is significant in that it foreshadows many of the themes that occupy his later work.

Although Bly has developed the reputation as a poet whose material is grounded in myth and psychology, it should not be surprising that cars show up so frequently in his writing. For someone who has made his living writing and giving readings, workshops, and lectures, it is only natural that he would drive so much and that so much of his remembered experience would be of events that occurred while he was in a car, usually alone. Driving is often a solitary activity, with drivers given to reflection, fantasizing, bouts of nostalgia and regret. Driving long distances in the Midwest, as Bly does, would give one the opportunity to engage in these meditative activities more than most. Bly does not fetishize the car, however; most of the time, he does not detail its make or model or, indeed, provide any specifics other than the fact that he is in transit, being in one place and going another. In this way, then, driving becomes a metaphor for journeying, though Bly’s journeys in these poems, at least on the surface, are usually fairly prosaic: mailing a letter, for example.

Literal journeys are integral to myth, symbolic of the process of self-exploration and discovery. Odysseus, for example, endured trials and tribulations through his journeys on Earth and in the underworld before he won the right to come home. Bly’s speakers are not nearly as adventurous as Odysseus. They do not fend off monsters or speak with the dead or have themselves strapped to the masts of ships to resist the temptations of sirens. They are modern men who go about their daily business unheroically and whose “adventures” more often than not consist of sudden bursts of awareness of their own emotions, their own mortality.

Life, like driving and like the mail, involves movement and destination, travel. Cars, like mailboxes, are metal containers that shield their contents from the weather and provide them with a degree of anonymity. The “cold iron” of the mailbox door, however, also evokes the coldness of the coffin, another container, this one for goods that have reached their destination. Bly’s speaker makes a trip into town to mail a letter, which itself expresses a desire to communicate with another human being. But, in taking in his surroundings, in paying them attention, he is also communicating with a deeper part of himself, a part that cannot be expressed in any rational way but that takes joy in its singleness, its “privacy.” In The Incorporative Consciousness of Robert Bly , Victoria Frenkel...

Bly’s “Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter” is like most classic lyric poems in that it manipulates the private meditations of a single speaker to explore a single theme or motif. But, Bly’s poem is unlike the classic lyric in that it avoids overt lyricism. The lack of musical devices in “Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter” is an example of the tendency of many poets of the contemporary American period to privilege clarity and accessibility over sound-play. Linguists and other students of language have generally held that lyricism obscures meaning. In The Rhetoric of the Other Literature, the linguist W. Ross Winterowd states

As poets have always known, it is possible to increase the difficulty of a text—i.e., decrease its readability or accessibility—by creating features that call attention to the language system, namely, rhyme and alliteration. Insofar as attention is diverted from meaning to sound, reading is more difficult.

Poets interested in subverting the elitism of the complicated language systems of the modernists often work in the plain-style, relying on the strategy of speech rather than the lyricism of song to produce and emulate human thought and feeling.

In general, plain-style poems avoid musical flourish by using the common, everyday diction of a conversational speaker. Although some plainstyle poems may replace the musicality achieved by sound-play with images and in this way become image-driven, some plain-style poems avoid image to emphasize conversational or speech-like diction to articulate emotion. In this age in which free verse has proven itself to be a more-than-valid means of writing memorable poems, it is important to ask what the risks of a lack of rhythm and music might be. Bly’s poem fails to move not because it is a free verse poem, but because it does not counteract its lack of music with metaphor or the use of original images.

Poets generally agree that the musicality of traditional lyrics helped bards in antiquity remember the verses they were required to recite without the aid of printed text. The rise of the plain-style is attributed in some ways to the invention of the printing press. The more poetry was written down, the less it needed to rhyme sounds and words. Yet other, more archetypally-inclined critics have suggested that the rhyming of sounds and words served psychological as well as technical purposes, suggesting, for example, that life patterns (such as the death of the harvest season each winter giving away to its own re-birth each spring) can be mimicked or emulated in the forms language takes. That is, a poem that produces a sound in its first line will remind people of the comforts of a returning season by repeating that sound in later lines.

Bly’s “Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter” explores the relationship between self and nature and the pleasures of privacy and peace by presenting a speaker who wants to “waste more time” by driving around in a snowstorm. Although Bly’s poem attempts to be ironic by wishing to violate the cultural clichés that suggest that humans are happiest when they are in non-threatening (i.e., warm and comforting) weather, this intention is not achieved since Bly’s speaker is not actually in the snowstorm, but rather inside his warm and comforting car. In other words, although Bly’s speaker attempts to articulate pleasure in the landscape the poem describes, and thus attempts to surprise by suggesting that all of nature is wondrous on some level, the fact that the speaker is in a car, rather than inside the snowstorm itself, undercuts the poem’s message. The form Bly has chosen for this observation also undercuts the poem’s power.

“Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter” is constructed of five end-stopped lines. The marriage of plain-style diction with statement or assertion produces a matter-of-fact tone. That is, the declarative sentences “It is a cold and snowy night” and “The main street is deserted” both describe nothing more or less than the bare facts of the speaker’s situation. These lines are notably about the exterior world, rather than the interior world of the speaker. The poem’s second line reinforces its first line’s plainly-spoken claim with one of the poem’s few images: the speaker states that “The only things moving are swirls of snow.” The poem’s third line places the speaker in a human activity; he tells us that he is lifting “a mailbox door.” Coupled with the title, this line suggests that the speaker is mailing a letter. The poem’s last two lines articulate a shift from a description of landscape and activity to a statement about the speaker’s feelings—he tells readers that because “there is a privacy [he loves] in this snowy night,” he will “[drive] around [and] waste more time.”

Although Bly’s speaker seeks to immerse a reader inside the natural world and make a statement about the possibility of even coldness and darkness producing pleasure by allowing for “privacy” or solitude, the poem’s technique undercuts the poem’s ability to move readers because it does not rise above its plain approach. That is, although a simple description of plainness could potentially articulate the kind of peacefulness and solitude Bly seeks to describe, the poem fails because its technical plainness is far too plain. Although it is possible to say that the repetition of the pronoun “I” in the poem is a kind of rhyme, the sound of the word is not its purpose. This fact is made clear by the fact that the word is not emphasized by its placement. Although the word “snowy” is repeated in the poem twice, the telling nature of the adjective undercuts lyricality, and may even seem lazyily inarticulate. Images, in comparison, are not often explicit or overtly obvious in meaning. Instead, the meaning of an image is suggested by the way a poet manipulates its presentation—the language, the format, and the subject matter of an image, and poem at large, can all be clues the poet uses to convey a point. The repetition of the sibilant ‘s’ sound in “swirls of snow” in the poem’s second line does produce a kind of pleasure, but this pleasure, too, is undercut by the fact that the description is cliché.

Bly’s use of adjectives also does not help the poem to move readers. For example, the speaker states that the night is “cold” and “snowy.” Although these words help describe the landscape of the poem, the use of comparison would have helped the speaker compare the night to something else in the world that is “cold” and “snowy.” In other words, adjectives in general can undercut a poet’s ability to imagine, since, unlike images, they do not require the imaginative leaps that linking unlike things together requires. It is not very difficult, that is, to say that a winter night is “cold” or that snow looks “snowy.” The same can be said for the adjective “deserted.” Hearing that “The main street is deserted” presents the loose picture of a street void of other people, but it does not depict the speaker’s specific street. It does not describe the speaker’s landscape in such a way as to distinguish it from all landscapes that could be said to be “deserted.” The adjectives in “Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter” thus make the speaker seem lazy or inarticulate.

Poets writing in the plain-style sometimes counter their use of conversational or speech-like diction with images, replacing the formal artifice of sound-play with the imaginative force of suggesting that one object or feeling in the world is like another object or feeling in the world. By these means, poets and other writers create pictures, making the essentially abstract nature of language more discernible and concrete. Yet, the only two images in “Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter” are clichés. Bly’s suggestion that “The only things moving are swirls of snow” in the poem’s second line is the poem’s first image, and his suggestion that the “mailbox” door in the poem’s third line is like “cold iron” is his second. Although these images could have potentially counteracted the plainstyle mode of this poem, they are clichés. It is too often said that snow “swirls,” and maybe even more too often said that hard metals are “cold” and like “iron.” Although it might be said that the ultimate point of poetry is to articulate feelings that cannot really be articulated, meaning in poetry, and in most forms of imaginative writing, is inherently tied to style or method. An original observation cannot be felt fully if it is articulated in unoriginal language or terms.

Since “Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter” focuses on the landscape of a snowstorm, its descriptive power or lack thereof becomes central. That is, the vast majority of the poem seeks to describe “a cold and snowy night” so that the speaker might explain the importance and beauty of privacy and solitude. But the poem’s refusal to counter a lack of interest in rhythm with sound play and image— as well as its reliance on clichéd descriptions— undercuts Bly’s ability to articulate this message memorably.

As William H. Gass writes in “The Soul of the Sentence” in The Habitations of the Word, “art should not produce a feeling of . . . gloom or dismay, but of energy, wholeness, perfection, joy.” Although Bly seeks in “Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter” to produce a moment of “energy, wholeness, perfection, [and] joy,” he fails because he does not sufficiently counter the frank, declarative statement of the plain-style with sound-devices, metaphors, and images.

Source: Adrian Blevins, Critical Essay on “Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2003. Blevins has published essays and poems in many magazines, journals, and anthologies and teaches writing at Roanoke College.