Your Mileage May Vary
The poem “ Your Mileage May Vary” by Andrew Shields can be recognized as a free verse poem since it does not follow any specific rhyme scheme or meter. The poem follows a family moving away and going on a road trip.This is told through literary devices or techniques and the structure of the poem. Some of these include allusion, imagery and the chronological order this poem follows.A theme established can be that everyone goes on a journey long or short experiencing new and or different things.
Allusion, an indirect way of referring to something or someone is also shown in every other line in each stanza.The italics seen in the poem can be envisioned as whispers or people’s inner thoughts. The italics are a reference
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“Your Mileage May Vary” tells the story of a family moving away and going on what seems to be a road trip. When first reading the poem it seems that the italics are random lines that do not correlate with the story it is telling. It is known that the italics represent song lyrics and the narrator's thoughts or whispers of conversations heard. The poem starts off describing the process of their move “ Our real last night, / footsteps on hardwood floors. People and friends / I still can recall.” (1.7-9) this describes how they had just experienced their last night in their house the italics can refer to a memory when they had people over for a special occasion and as they are leaving that house behind they will not be leaving behind the memory of that house. The second stanza starts off with the family getting ready to leave “Leaving the morning with Dad in the back./The danger on the rocks is surely past./ Big sisters with licenses. Baby you can drive/my car.”(2.1-4) the narrator recalls his older sister driving as his father rides in the back. As the poem ends so does their road trip “Our first night in the house, and not our last.”(2.30) the story ends with the family arriving at their new