Outbound Poem Analysis

In a group with Anna Duncan, Nina Zhu and myself, we read the poem “Outbound” by Greg Williamson. We took the same strategy that was used when we deciphered the poem “On my First Son” by understanding the poem line by line. Going line by line, we were able to understand our assigned poem and have a conclusive idea for the meaning of the poem.

As a group, we originally thought we had understood the poem, right before we moved on Nina and I decided to go through the line and really comment about difficulties we had. I said “We don’t know who the passengers are and why they are are train. What is the purpose of this journey?” Trying to come up for a sample metaphor she claimed was “stupid” Anna suggested, “Maybe passengers is referring to all

From line 8, however, is where we struggled most. I had difficulty with some of the vocabulary but after some research, we were able to understand that the double-dagger poles of power companies were simply power lines and they were replacing the previous image of the trees that the passengers had previously seen in hindsight. We had trouble with line 10 because the usage of the words footnotes did not seem to fit the poem the way we felt it should have. As Nina said, “In a formal paper it is [footnotes] used to cite or further explain something.” Anna had an “ah-ha” moment and in the process of explaining, lost both Nina and myself. Repeating the lines and elaborating a little more helped both of us understand. This is what she said, “ When you read it, it says a line of oaks comes into focus, so you see some trees, and it fades which means that the line of oaks is replaced by the double dagger of power companies, which we say power lines, and it says footnotes that redefine the trees. So footnotes are something that explains something above or previously and so I think that the double dagger poles of the power companies are redefining the trees.” In fewer words, the double dagger poles explain what had appeared previously being both a footnotes and a definition for the image of trees. The next two lines, “An asterisk in glass, then window shades, Graffiti, billboards, tattered banderoles Of southbound birds” were just detailed images. An “asterisk in glass, then window shades” describes the event when the sun hits the window and you can see the tiny stars of light where smudges might be. An asterisk is also a grammatical symbol as is a footnote. In those lines you see aspects of writing and composition. However, both of my partners struggled to understand “tattered banderoles of southbound birds.” I had interpreted it as the wings of birds, broken