Wade In The Water By Tracy K. Smith

Wade in the Water by Tracy K. Smith is a collection of poems that cover a wide variety of interconnected concepts. The fourth part of this collection focuses on personal identity. In the poem “The Everlasting Self”, the author describes personal identity with two short but meaningful sentences that together display the resilience of the self in the face of adversity. The author uses purposeful diction, signifying syntax, and elaborate similes to reveal a definition of the everlasting self, which provides a clear representation of the collective experience of shaping personal identity.

Since “The Everlasting Self” is noticeably short, the words within the poem have a lot of meaning and every word choice the author made is intentional. Throughout

The first is on line five where the author suggests the conditioning of the self is “Like love/ From a lifetime ago,” (Smith, lines 5-6). This simile creates an example scenario where conditioning of the self occurs. Love from a lifetime ago implies the love has come and gone. This suggests there were lessons learned from the love and that the love still exists though it may be long forgotten. This also indicates that some of the adversity we face is self-made. Love is a choice someone makes and therefore the mess it creates is due to that choice. However, throwing the mess away would be to reject love moving forward, instead we are forced to clean the mess and continue forward. The second simile occurs on line six where the author compares the conditioning of the self to “mud/ A dog has tracked across the floor.” (Smith, lines 6-7). This also shows a negative action occurring from a choice someone makes. While the owner of a dog did not purchase the dog with the hopes it would make a mess on the floor, it inevitably occurs. Whether the owner likes it or not the mess exists, and they are forced to clean the mess up and to continue going forward perhaps, with an idea to prevent the dog from tracking mud on the floor again. These two similes highlight the creation of messes or adversities, in which the only thing natural to do is to clean them up and to move forward remembering vaguely the negativity associated with the mess, or as the author describes, we gather, shed, spread, then forget and