Where I come from
The key idea of the poem seems to be
that a person’s character is always formed at least in part by the place where
he or she is born – “People are made of places”. Wherever you go in life you
will carry with you memories and echoes of your birthplace, whether it is a city,
as in the first stanza, or the quiet Canadian countryside where Elizabeth
herself was born – “Where I come from, people carry woods in their minds” – and
certainly the picture she draws in the second stanza does seem at first to be
idyllic and wonderful, strongly contrasting with the city images in the first
stanza.This idea shows us that who we are is shaped by where we were born and
where we grew up, but this is not the end of the shaping process, as the first
line suggests ‘People are made of places’, you are shaped as much by where you
were born and grew up as the places that you go to after your childhood, the
things that you experience in other places, the things that you see.
Stanza 1
This
stanza deals with the organized and fast paced life of the city. In the city
everything is precise and controlled; everything runs like clockwork. • Line
1-3: The first two lines of the poem summarise the main theme of the poem
perfectly. ‘People are made of places.’ As the theme suggests people will never
be able to forget their past, or where they came from.
• Line
3-4: ‘Atmosphere of cities how different drops from them’ The author is trying
to show that the atmosphere of the place you live in can affect the way that
you live, throughout the year as nature progresses through its
seasons, atmospherically
city life changes greatly.
Line
4-5: ‘Like the smell of smog or the almost-not-smell of tulips in the spring’,
smog telling us about a typical winters day with density of the air being
greater and the water vapor blinding our site, ‘the almost-not-smell of tulips
in the spring’ this tells us how the flowers of spring are starting to blossom,
not fully produced and grown the smell of the tulips can not yet be
appreciated
fully and with the combined smells of the
city one could think
that
they are smelling the tulips when actually the city life prevents the scent of
the tulip to a high degree.
• Line
6-7: The idea of the city being organized and tidily planned out is introduced
in these lines, ‘nature tidily plotted in little squares with a fountain in the
center’, telling us that within the city life, nature still exists in
public
parks, which have been plotted around the city in small areas to provide the
reassurance of sanity within the community, that nature still exists within the
city environment but is scarce and nature cannot go about
its
business how intended to because of the interruptions of city life and pollution.
Line
7-8: ‘museum smell, art also tidily plotted with a guidebook’. This compares
the tidily plotted countryside to tidily plotted art in an art museum, with a
guidebook. The guide book can be a metaphor for life, we try to control
everything, to guide ourselves through life instead of taking one step at a
time.
• Line
9-10: ‘the smell of work, glue factories maybe, chromium-plated offices’, the
city is full of skyscraping office buildings built of steel and other sharp
precise materials to give a uniform look and feel to the atmosphere, also with
great complexes comes great amounts of pollution, which Elizabeth is relating
to with ‘the smell of work, glue factories maybe’.
• Line
10-11: In the end of the stanza ‘smell of subways crowded at rush hours’, this
shows the congestion that is caused by overpopulation of the city. It also
shows how rushed life in the city is. Also it shows that at the end of the day,
no matter where you come from, if you work in chromium plated offices or glue
factories, everyone has the same goal and that is to get home.
Stanza 2
The
second stanza introduces an idea change in the poem. The focus of
the
poem now shifts more to country and rural life; similar to that in which Brewster
herself grew up in.
• Line
12-13: These lines provide us with key details in which we can relate to
Brewster’s childhood, ‘Where I come from, people carry woods in their minds,
acres of pine woods’. Coming from New Brunswick, Canada, is 80% forested and so
the forest or ‘woods’ will always be in the peoples minds as it is the centre
of the little community.
• Line
14: People here care about things that people in the city would laugh at, like
‘blueberry patches in the burned-out bush’. To the people in the community this
is relatively significant as it is the growing of something new where before
there was nothing.
Life
15: ‘wooden farmhouses, old, in need of paint’. This is in direct contrast to
the first stanza where everything is new and attractive. The old farmhouses are
there solely to serve a purpose and until they stop serving that purpose they
will be kept, regardless of looks.
hens
kept in yards, generally used to provide a source of food in the form of
eggs,
or literally speaking the chickens themselves. Also the chickens and hens being
kept in yards, shows us that in the country there is the room to spare to be
able to keep these chickens and hens, whereas in conjunction with the first stanza,
the chickens would not be kept as there is no room nor is there any need to
keeping the chickens and hens.
• Line
17-18: ‘The battered schoolhouse’ again places emphasis on it being an old
building remaining only for practical purposes and not being replaced by a more
attractive building. ‘behind which violets grow’ just backs up the earlier line
of ‘blueberry's growing in the burnt out bush’, it shows how nature can create
a picture of beauty anywhere, out of anything.
Line
18-19: ‘Spring and winter are the mind’s chief seasons: ice and the breaking of
ice.’ Spring and winter are two opposing seasons and winter could therefore
represent the cold city life and spring the colorful country life. ‘Ice and
breaking of ice’ refers to something in the mind that is broken when one makes
the transition from the city to the country.
• Line
20-21: ‘A door in the mind blows open, and there blows a frosty wind from fields
of snow.’ The last two lines are puzzling. The door blowing open is just
another gateway opening in the mind to the memories that she holds of her
childhood. The second half these lines ‘and there blows a frosty wind
from fields of snow.’ is there to give a feel to the picture that she
has been
describing
and it gives the reader a cold feeling. The frosty wind from the
fields
of snow is relevant because in Canada the winter is very frosty with a
lot of snow and wind.
The last 2 lines of the
poem:
The
"door" could be the memory opening in a blast of nostalgia, but the
association
of winter and the "frosty wind" suggest something less pleasant,
like a
realisation that the past, her place, is not so good after all. This is
supported
by the content of the second stanza, where things may seem
superficially
attractive in a rustic way, but are “burned out”, “old, in need of paint”,
where the chickins cluck “aimlessly” and buildings are “battered”. So the
suggestion is that it is easy to remember formative places all to positively, but
their legacy can be negative; a “frosty wind” in the mind?
