Daystar Rita Dove Analysis

Daystar by Rita Dove is a freestyle poem that effectively uses symbolism, imagery and tone to tell the story of a woman that is searching for a place she can call her own, for just a few minutes, while she escapes from the overwhelming pressures of her everyday life. Throughout the poem she remains nameless; she has lost her identity and she longs for the days before she became someone’s wife and mother. In the first stanza of Daystar, Dove begins the poem by showing us how exhausted, not only physically but mentally, the woman is. “She wanted a little room for thinking, but she saw diaper steaming on the line.” (Mays 736) This line refers to her need for time to think but she knows that she still has chores waiting for her that need to

Dove uses sarcasm to show the mother’s feelings when she imagines what her daughter will say when she discovers her mother out behind the garage. “And just what was mother doing out back with the field mice? Why, building a palace.” (Mays 736) This shows that the woman is tired and has very little patience for any innocent questions her daughter might have. Later that evening, as she unhappily accepts her husband’s unwanted attention, she uses her imagination to escape the situation. “She would open her eyes and think of the place that was hers for an hour-where she was nothing, pure nothing, in the middle of the day.” (Mays 376) The woman appears nameless throughout the poem, and this line signifies that she longs for the time when she could go back to being nameless again. As she is being, I hesitate to use the word raped.by her husband, she imagines she is back behind the garage for just that one hour. There she is just a nameless, faceless person. She is not someone’s wife or someone’s mother. She is just