At the beginning, we start with the line, “the opposite of homesickness.” We begin this escape of a poem, somewhat at home, wherever home seems to be for each reader. For instance, my actual home is in Hawaii, but when reading this poem, Lawrenceville assumed the role of “home” because it is where I am now, and in a way we are sort of trapped inside these gated walls. I realized in the fall, when I took the Russian literature course, Lawrenceville was quite similar to how those Russian work camps ran. It was a scary thought, but of course some punishment like detention is not nearly as bad as the punishment of those prison camps. We don’t starve on small rations of bread like they did, but we have days, where there is nothing to eat at Irwin. Anyway, this association established the “home” in the poem as Lawrenceville for me. Then as the poem reads on, we “imagine a love turned out” or took a couple of baby steps away from home through the escape of imagination. Next, we step bigger with strides as big as walking on only the white strips of paint at a crosswalk. The steps become bigger because we start to pick up the pace and head “to the rivers,” somewhere further from home, in the nooks and crannies of the world. Then, we take “fire-flights,” which relative the previous two steps, is as if we jump over a branch in the pathway. As a side note, this couplet reminded me of Elizabeth Bishop’s The Armadillo. With the line, “forms alighting, then airborne,” I imagined the fire balloons in The Armadillo, which would be lit, then fly up taking “fire-flights.” However, the only difference is that in this poem, we readers become those fire balloons and in Farsickness, we don’t come crashing down to ruin everything below. In fact, after taking two leaps, we catch the wind, “until the breeze begins / to feel like hunger.” The way that line breaks, sort of takes a sharp turn. With the first line, it seems as though the wind is beginning to blow, but by the second line of this couplet, the wind is actually beginning “to feel like hunger.” Perhaps this taste of wind, the extra umph that makes us float a little longer, makes us hungry for more distance. Then, by the next stanza, we become this “holy wheel,” which I imagine as quite large, therefore covering a lot of distance away from with each revolution, each step of the foot or when each spoke touches the ground. Then, farther and farther we travel, around the sun, like the pilgrim’s chaff. Finally, we reach the horizon. Perhaps in the imagination where the world is flat, that would be the farthest we could get.
I’m not quite interpreting what is going on in the poem, because it is unclear to me what it means “to both call and receive” in the context of farsickness. This is more of the imagery that popped up in my head as I read, as I strung together the words, home, imagine, rivers, airborne, breeze, etc. Though I took these key words out of their lines, their meaning still provides that longing to escape, travel and explore.
I think your reflection in the final paragraph is dead-on. This is less an interpretation of the poem--although there are moments when you do do that, and well--than an associative reading of it--the poem as prompt for memory, association, reflection. There is nothing wrong with that--part of the meaning of any poem is what it means, idiosyncratically, to us. I guess I would also have liked to see you wrestle a bit more with the actual language of the poem, which is quite beautiful but also quite challenging. I too was drawn both to the title and to this particular poem, and I would have been interested in seeing what you made of it interpretively.
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