Joyce Kilmer’s “The Subway” characterizes a typical ride home on New York’s most accessible, and for natives, a mundane form of transportation – the subway. Foremost, the poem is characterized in the Petrarchan, or Italian, sonnet format where the first eight lines follow an ABBAABBA pattern. Initially, the poetic speaker begins to characterize and contrast the passengers, onboard – amongst the speaker are “Tired clerks, pale girls, street cleaners, business men, Boys, priests and harlots, drunkards, students, thieves”, all sitting amongst one another with the same objective of getting home. New York has always been considered a melting pot of cultures, ethnicities, racial and religious backgrounds, etc. but the speaker chose to closely analyze the eccentric, humdrum, admirable, and discreditable members of society. The contrast begins slowly with the overworked workforce and girls with pallor appearances as both demographics are implied to have been rundown. Then a contrast between socioeconomic classes is evident with the implication that the speaker’s audience understands the class disparity between street sweepers and Manhattan businessmen; even the distinguishment between young” boys” and old “men”. The last grouping of passengers starkly contrasts each of their respective moral compasses; anyone who has ridden on any type of mass transport can imagine a train car filled with pious priests, nihilistic party girls, roaring drunks, stressed students, and guilty thieves, ready to be caught red-handed.
Subsequent to the speaker’s colorful descriptions of the train’s passengers, the focus of the poem changes to visual imagery but instead, briefly, to sound as audiences can hear the passengers “mingle in this stifling, loud-wheeled pen [and] the gate clangs”. Passengers scurry about when their stop has arrived and the pang of the gate’s opening and closing is heard after each person departs. The car is personified as “[it thunders] through the dark. The long train weaves [through the tracks]”. The journey of the subway is almost an adventure for all those aboard. Running through mostly darkness, commuters are at times blessed as they “see awhile God’s day, then night again”, due to the sporadic light fixtures in the pre-modern subway line.
Following this, the rhyme scheme, as well as the tone of the poem, changes to at the ninth line with a CDE CDE pattern that is utilized for the remainder of the poem’s duration. The first stanza’s tone is arguably presented as a paradoxical combination of jaded and wondrous due to the incredibly heterogeneous gathering of commuters the speaker saw before him. Readers are led to believe that such a gathering with people of the night would have occurred at the end of a long Friday. However, in the second stanza, to reader’s amazement, that this is just a regular daytime trip, as the car was “Hurled through the dark– day at Manhattan Street”; this is not a surprise to any native New Yorker – the city is a place of endless possibilities where you could run into quite literally anyone, at anytime. It is based upon my own personal analysis that the speaker is not from New York, as he is one who will “rest all night. That is [his] life, it seems”, which is not quite in alignment with New York’s catchphrase, being “the city that never sleeps”. The speaker is as lost on the subway as he is in life, alluding to the contrast between light and darkness, “Through sunless ways go my reluctant feet. The sunlight comes in transitory gleams.” Historically, in literature, lightness is symbolically represented as being what is right and just and true; whereas darkness is what’s wrong, evil, and unjust. The speakers struggle to step out into the darkness, unsure of what to expect. Despite the speaker’s fears, he understands that “[the] darkness makes the light more sweet, The perfect light about me– in my dreams”. The speaker recognizes that there will be light in his own reality but for now, the power of visualization will allow for his own escape and reinstatement in his hope.
Change is hard, evidently. Being whisked into a new environment with absurd occurrences, and obscure characters can be overwhelming for nearly everyone – no matter how strong a person they are.
For the purposes of this poem, I will be making a different sort of connection rather than a generally based, societal issue. I have decided upon using my own personal experiences to connect with the speaker of the poem to create an intimate and vulnerable connection that perhaps anyone reading this post can identify, rather than some ambiguous and vague conclusion paragraph about how “being homesick is hard”. That wouldn’t be helpful to anyone, here.
Originally, I had intended to find any poem that resonated with me and my home – New York. I was born and raised just outside of New York City; and for safety reasons, I will not state any direct whereabouts (sorry, Stalkers of the Web), but the move to rural Pennsylvania has been more of a culture shock than I could have ever prepared myself for. The subway doesn’t scare me, it never really has. Except for one time I saw a bunch of chickens on the subway tracks and screamed the type of bloody murder only a seven-year-old with a bleeding heart would because “Mommy, the train is going to make them nuggets!”. The speaker in this poem is in the opposite position as I am, or so I am concluding for the sake of my analysis. He is lost and searching for the light of the metaphorical tunnel which he is presenting with glimmering flecks of light in the quite literal subway tunnel. He is unsure of his new home in New York; the characters amongst him leave him aghast, and he likely cannot navigate the subway nor the actual streets very well. On the other hand, upon my arrival to State College, I was appalled at the lack of diversity, not only in terms of racial demographics, but also religious, political, and even cultural practices. Perhaps it was some sick trick of the universe, but the initial weeks of schools I seemed to be a magnet for anyone in who was going to give me some missionary youth-group card, a rant about some conservative talking point, or to even to inform me that I was “too open-minded”.
One particular phone call between my father and I began with him asking how I was finding everything to my liking if I had made many friends. I responded with, “Dad, I was talking to this girl and she didn’t know what the MET was.” It’s not her fault, she’s a big shot athlete, with no interest in art, nor any time to develop one. I didn’t mean to come across as arrogant or pretentious. But this was my own version of Dorothy’s “We’re not in Kansas, anymore”.
The MET is my Disneyworld. There is no other place in the world to me, like the MET, and it helps that admission for residents is a pick your price kind of deal. This past year, I spent my 18th birthday, not in school, but aimlessly walking through the museum, although I had seen it all before. The type of passive learning through visuals is the kind I most adore, and there’s so much left to interpretation – another thing I’m big on.
A string of minuscule differences in one’s environment eventually lead to a conglomerate of micro-aggressions coming together to realize that one is out of one’s element. And just as the speaker, I am looking for the light at the end of the tunnel, which is ultimately becoming better assimilated with the new, surrounding culture.
Ralph Fasanella, Subway Riders, 1950. From the collection of the American Folk Art Museum, Gift of Ralph and Eva Fasanella.
*Not the same subway described in the poem, just a piece of art I admire 🙂 *