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Tobias Wolff Say Yes Poem

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Robert Gray’s Imagist poems, Late Ferry and Flames and Dangling Wire, and Tobias Wolff’s short story, Say Yes, are texts indicative of the relentless cycle of human experience – journey and discovery. A series of isolated discoveries can come together to show a result hitherto either foreseen or unexpected; the synergy between instances and patterns creates the journey of discovery that leads to closure or condemnation. Individual discoveries that lead to finality often have their own inciting moments. These discrete discoveries connect to indicate the final destination, the nature of which is very different from persona to persona. In some cases, the future destination can be discovered by extrapolating the pattern between such inciting moments. …show more content…

In Wolff’s text, the female character uses brevitas to imply what she already knows of her husband’s personality: “You won’t, I can tell. You’re going to say no… No more considering. Yes or no.” She knows what he will tell her but in forcing him to say it, proves the audience right in re what they had extrapolated earlier in reading: the male character is racist. Given the conflict in their ideologies, the audience can further extrapolate from here that some form of argument or fight will ensue. The audience is similarly led to a final destination through a minor discovery in Gray’s Flames and Dangling Wire: “A sour smoke is hauled out everywhere, thin, like rope.” The inferred meaning of rope in the dystopic context of the poem is that of a hangman’s noose and the assonance in “sour smoke” creates the sound of hissing flames, the image being augmented by the mention of smoke. The implications present in this sentence, when combined with the Hellish lexical chain present throughout the poem, lead the reader to the conclusion that the world in the text will inexorably become a dystopia akin to Dante’s Hell. In another of Gray’s poems, Late Ferry, a different conclusion is reached in a similar way. Two distinct lexical chains appear throughout this poem – one concerning horror (dark, windy night, beyond, plunge of night, trembles, nervously, …show more content…

Late Ferry characterises the motif of light as a steadily improving idea. It progresses from the personification of “the longer white lights feel nervously about in the blackness towards here, like hands after the light switch” to the ferry simile “I can find it while it’s on darkness, like tasting honeycomb, filled as it is with its yellow light”. The gradual change in mood accomplished through such techniques creates the sensation in the reader that the journey is improving and that the destination – unmentioned in the poem – will be a pleasant one overall. The audience discovers that change can be quite agreeable. This promotion of change is supported by the use of the light motif in Flames and Dangling Wire, in which every instance of light is somehow linked to fire: “fires in a row”, “fog over the hot sun”, “dampened fires”, &c. Alone, this is indicative enough of Hell, but the fact that each mention of fire is described as somehow affected by human waste links the concept of Dantean Christian Hell to condemnation of sin. Even before the persona undergoes his epiphany – “I realise I am in the future. This is how it shall be after men have gone” – the audience discovers this independently. The environment created in the poem is in great need of

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