'The Furthest Distances I've Travelled' - Leontia Flynn

Title: “The Furthest Distances I’ve Travelled”

1. distances = metaphorical + physical

   1. “travelled” → past tense → "

2. INITIAL THOUGHT → distance = geographical

3. FINAL THOUGHT → distance = metaphorical

4. the reader parallels the same thought journey as the speaker → that the distances are real, and then that they are emotional!!!

“Like many folk, when first I saddled a rucksack, / feeling its weight on my back”

“saddled” → imperfection + heartiness?

“saddled” - like a driving seat? first glances at autonomy

“weight on my back” → bodily physicality

“the way my spine / curved under its meridian”

simile suggests that the speaker felt this backpack opened up a whole world to them → their body mirrors the globe they are about to travel

“spine” → bodily physicality

enjambment enacts this curvature

rhyme scheme?

roughly in couplets → loose slant rhyme

“I thought: Yes. This is how / to live”

lack of punctuation indicates a straight-away naivety?

youthful determination + fate?

caesura slows reader down significantly → this is a significant moment!!!

The stanzas become…

denser + denser → to do with increasing emotional fulfilment?

“On the beaten track, the sherpa pass, between / Krakow / and Zagreb”

geographical variety → speaker not selective in where they end up

enjambment → pushes the reader forwards, representing an enthusiasm?

“and Zagreb, or the Siberian white / cells of scattered airports”

NO RHYME? perhaps the speaker’s belief that they have ‘found the way to live’ is illusory?!

“white / cells of scattered airports” → sense of detachment? clinical?

caesurae slows down within lines → pauses

“it came clear as over a tannoy / that in restlessness, in anony / mity: / was some kind of destiny”

1. forced rhyme with the splitting of ‘anonymity’ → this is not destiny!! forced destiny?!

2. “restlessness” → disjointedness to all this travelling?

3. anonymity = a big part of the speaker’s adventure? something broke about anonymity itself?

   1. MITY v DESTINY and TANNOY and ANONY look like they should rhyme, eye rhymes, but they don’t → disingenuity to this ‘fate’ of travelling?!

“So whether it was the scare stories about Larium / - the threats of delirium”

the rhyme get weaker + weaker

em dash → separateness + fragmented nature → shaken confidence?

larium = drug used to treat malaria with big side effects (baldness and delirium)

sudden change in perspective - don’t know when it happened → youthful courage to adult concern is an unknowable tipping point!

“that led me, not to a Western Union / wiring money with six words of Lithuanian”

“that led me” → fate and temptation has shifted

“to this post office with a handful of bills / or a giro”

RHYME SCHEME OUT THE WINDOW

post office → symbol of movement and transaction - and yet the speaker stays stationary!

“giro” → unemployment check → living a much more ordinary life than before

“and why, if I’m stuffing smalls / hastily into a holdall,”

no rhyme → life lost its glamour

smalls = underwear

enjambments - speaker’s surprise

“catching a Greyhound from Madison to / Milwaukee // that to be doing some overdue laundry”

Milwaukee = only word in the line → isolation of travel and exotic destinations

“overdue laundry” → time pressure matters now - it didn’t before??

“However, / when, during routine evictions, I discovered”

“routine evictions” = mirrors the constant movement of travelling in childhood, only this time is law-enforced?

embedded clause - at the heart of this idea is constant movement?

discovered → like an explorer → like past travelling life → but now discovering from within the house!

“alien pants, cinema stubs, the throwaway / comment - on a Post-it -”

random assortment of objects → each symbolic of childhood / life without travelling far → souvenirs of homelife

still enjambment - like enjambment of the actual travelling?!

“pressed flowers amid bottom drawers, / I know these are my souvenirs”

“pressed flowers” = life preserved

no symbol of destiny, only collections?!

dealing with continual change without distance?!

“I know” → compared to the sudden “Yes. I thought:” → sense of security in the peace?

“and, from these crushed valentines, this unravelled / sports sock”

= the objects are all symbols of relationships that have ended

= relationships aren’t easy

“unravelled” → representative of the unravelled relationship!?

“that the furthest distances I’ve travelled / have been those between people”

metaphorical distances

enjambment - enacts the distance

“and what survives / of holidaying briefly in their lives.”

“Survives” = sounds more arduous than physical travel?!

impermanence → “holidaying” sounds casual → like the travelling in the distant parts of the world →

ephemerality of relationships but the permanence of their effects?

towards the end of the poem…

the rhyme scheme is not only restored, but stabilised → metaphor for the emotional stabilisation of a quiet life!

more cohesion - effortless rhyme