Student Question
Summarize "Meeting at an Airport" by Taha Muhammad Ali and identify any repeated literary devices.
Quick answer:
"Meeting at an Airport" by Taha Muhammad Ali is a free verse poem that narrates a reunion between two people who haven't seen each other in years. The poem highlights how the same question, asked years apart, elicits vastly different emotional responses. It employs literary devices like synecdoche and repetition, notably using figurative language to convey the speaker's changing emotions over time.
“Meeting at an Airport” is a free verse poem. It has 6 stanzas, each of which are different lengths. It does not use a discernible meter. It is a memoir and tells a story in which the speaker is an active participant.
The poem’s story is simple: two people who haven’t seen each other in a long time unexpectedly meet in an airport, and one asks the other a question they discussed many years ago. The first time the speaker is asked the question, his response prompts laughter, and metaphorical blossoming and happy birdsong. The second time he is asked the question, all those years later, his answer prompts weeping, and metaphorical wilting flowers, and doves “in the silk of their sorrow” (line 59).
The meaning behind the poem is that love and familiarity can be comforting and upsetting depending on their context. What once gave us joy can, after time has passed, inspire very different feelings.
The poem uses many literary devices, including figurative language and repetition.
An example of figurative language is that the speaker refers to “the eyelashes of my surprise,” an example of synecdoche where “eyelashes” stands in for the entire face’s expression of surprise (lines 8-9). This gives the reader a feeling of fragility as well as of the speaker being visibly shocked at the question. Another piece of figurative language, which is repeated, is the speaker’s reference to his blood being “like the shadow cast by a cloud of starlings” (lines 11-12 and 50-51). The cloud of starlings move in very different ways each time they appear. This repetition reinforces that the poem’s speaker is the very same person, but that his mood, and hence the response of the starlings, is different.
Get Ahead with eNotes
Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.
Already a member? Log in here.