Still Life in Landscape

Sharon OldsFiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2004

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Symbols & Motifs

The Road

The highway transcends the scene of the accident in “Still Life in Landscape.” The speaker’s childhood recollection—her family driving in a car along the highway—conjures American freedom and exploration. The adventure halts at the site of an accident, and the body of a woman lies inappropriately in the road itself. All progress waits, forced to acknowledge the violence: A vehicle—the tool used for freedom—becomes a tool of destruction. The road becomes a backdrop, but instead of a blank slate for new ideas or for access (as in works like Jack Kerouac’s On the Road) it’s a tableau of violent peril. The “broken glass / on wet black macadam” (Lines 15-16) is a reminder that the road can lead as easily to death; in fact, death is the eventual destination. The speaker arranges her memory in the last line, much as all the elements of disorder “ranged round” the body “on the tar” of the road (Line 25).

The Human Body

Her focus on the physical earned Sharon Olds the occasional title “poet of the body,” and the poem “Still Life in Landscape” accords in its unabashed detail of physical form. The speaker inventories the body left on the highway: back, head, shoulders, spine, leg, and thigh. The word “back” appears three times in Lines 3-5, each with a different denotation. In Line 3, “back” means the physical body part of the victim. The adverb “back” describes the disposition of the woman’s head in Line 4, and in Line 5, the “back” part of the woman’s head rests against her spine, comparing linguistic elasticity to that of the human body. The speaker’s view is diverted when her mother envelops her with her own body, physically turning her gaze: “my mother grabbed my head and turned it” (Line 11). The speaker remains caught against her mother’s chest, her head “between her breasts” (Line 13), her body fused again with her mother’s as a stay against the outer violence. In Olds’s work, the body represents the personal and intimate, but also something nearly external as our identity’s mode of interaction with the world. Olds shares Whitman’s sense of wonder at the body’s scientific mechanics alongside its mysterious relationship with the self. Whitman draws on Emerson’s “Nature,” in which Emerson divides the world into Nature and Soul, Soul being the Self, and all of the “not-me” being Nature—including the body. Like Whitman and Emerson, Olds attempts to negotiate the fragments and bridge the divide between self and body: “this was her abandoned matter” (Line 10). Absent the soul, the body returns to nature.

Time of Day

A poem about mortality almost certainly addresses time. For all her descriptive precision, the speaker of “Still Life in Landscape” at first seems less definite in her temporal distinctions. The surface narrative—a memory—is chronological, but there is a memory within the memory, as the speaker recalls her father’s recent drunken recklessness. The sense of time is further complicated by questions of mortality that imbue the whole of the poem with a subtle eschatological weight, as time leans after eternity: “This was / the world—maybe the only one” (Lines 17-18).

In addition to its temporal expansiveness, the speaker’s imagination engages the symbolic; time of day appears both literally and metaphorically. The first line establishes a concrete timeline in literal terms: “It was night” (Line 1). Later, the family comes on the scene from “neutral twilight” (Line 15). The next allusion to time, however, comes through metaphor: the “midnight” (Line 17) of the glass-strewn road, where the sky falls to become “underlying” (Line 16), inverting the world. The speaker remembers her father “recently” (Line 20) almost hit another person with his car—and the association effects a transformation of the world itself into something fatalistic, wherein infinite potential victims only await their appointed hour of disaster.