Still Life in Landscape

Sharon OldsFiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2004

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form and Meter

The poem’s structure relies on a four-stress line, though not one that scans consistently. The poem resembles free verse in that any number of unstressed syllables may be present in each line, as few as one or as many as 11. Olds notes that her poems have a particular shape on the page: a solid left-justified side with an undulated right side, uneven line lengths that visually mimic tree branches or human limbs (an image resonant in this poem especially). Certain lines acquire emphasis from particular metrical features. The shortest line of the poem contains two spondees connected by an unaccented syllable: “leg gone, a long bone” (Line 8). A defining turn in the poem scans as catalectic trochaic tetrameter: “neutral twilight, broken glass” (Line 15), echoing the hymnody from Olds’s childhood.

Metaphor

It is not until nearly the midpoint of “Still Life in Landscape” that the narrative overtly moves from the literal to the metaphorical. The poem begins with the speaker’s childhood memory of witnessing the aftermath of a traffic accident. She describes the debris in detail, particularly a woman’s corpse still in the wreckage. Finally in Line 11, the speaker’s mother physically turns the speaker’s head to move her gaze from outward to inward, pressed against the mother’s body—and here the narrative takes on a new symbolic dimension. The road, glistening with broken glass, becomes the sky in Line 17, flipping the world vertically after her gaze was rotated horizontally. The dead woman represents the pedestrian her father almost hit with his car (Lines 20-22). The speaker says, “This was / the world” (Lines 17-18), meaning this entire scene. The leftover broken bits of a violent encounter make up “the only one,” the only world for her (Line 18). The speaker separates her own identity from that of the dead woman: “she was not I, she was not my mother” (Line 23), but she suggests the woman does represent “a model of the mortal” (Line 24), thus ultimately relating both her mother and herself—and all mortals—to the victim. The poem itself, described as a genre of painting, becomes a metaphor for perception and understanding, the impossibility of objectivity, and the problem of memory. All stories manifest in fragments—arranged with some meaning, but never the complete picture of the past.

Alliteration

Poems with loose metrical form often rely on acoustic patterns for structure. “Still Life in Landscape” employs alliterative structures and internal rhyme within and between lines, emphasizing rhythmic patterns and significant imagery. “Strewn” and “still” echo in Line 2, followed by “lying” and “highway” in Line 3. Line 8’s “leg gone, a long bone” intertwines l, g, and long “o” sounds—the sound Edgar Allan Poe identified in his essay “The Philosophy of Composition” as the most mournful of tones. Sounds connect “matter,” “mother,” “grabbed,” and “clamped” in Lines 10 through 12; Lines 12 and 13 rhyme internally with “chest” and “breast.” Lines 15 and 16 contain the intricate “broken glass / on wet black macadam,” bilabial and guttural consonants interwoven with short “a” sounds in a percussive sequence, followed by the twinkling “midnight abristle with stars” (Line 17), crossed bilabials, short “i” sounds, and the repeated “st” sound. “Model of the mortal,” one of the most important phrases contextually, could be described as cross alliteration, repetition, or half-rhyme.