The Road - Nancy Fotheringham Cato

Message: the human journey through life, and how the fight against time is pointless and impossible to stop. Also a comment on how we hurtle through life without appreciating the present.

A musing on life, death and time, as well as landscape and our place in it.

Summary: speaker describes a car journey through a deserted rural landscape towards the sunrise.

Context: Nancy FC 1917-2000 was an Australian poet and environmental activist. She had a strong interest in the aboriginal people and a gift for lyrics. Written in the 50’s, a time when Australia was concerned with making a name for itself on the world stage.

Speaker: no name, age or gender, helps the experience feel universal.

Themes:

  1. Life, death and time - speaker is rushing down the metaphorical road of life towards the light of a new dawn. They have embraced their place within the natural rhythms of the universe.

Form, meter and rhyme:

  • 5 quatrains

  • Ballard stanzas with Ballard meter (traditional) - a contrast to metaphysical nature of her subject matter

  • Alternate between loose iambic tetrameter and trimeter - common meter

  • Rhythm of the meter expresses speeding motion of the car

  • ABAB rhyme scheme for first stanza. ABCB rhyme for following stanzas.

  • Last stanza only has a very loose rhyme scheme

  • Alternate rhyming quatrains jarring the otherwise perfect pattern - feels natural and rugged

  • Use of first person narrative and past tense

  • Use of Ballad style - used in narrative poems, predictable rhythms made them easier to remember and share. Often used to describe dramatic love stories or adventures - this elevates Cato’s subject matter.

Language:

  • Poem begins with the powerful of language of I made/ I raced showing they feel completely in control and unstoppable. These are also dynamic verbs which give the poem a sense of movement immidetly.

  • Personification of surroundings such as shouldering hill/ time itself/ stars swarmed - creates both a sense of comfort and brings attention to the aliveness of the surroundings.

  • Enjambment of the moon moving behind the hill emphasizes the movement of the hill as it seems to fall from one line onto the next.

  • ‘Time itself stood still’ - dental alliteration, shows speaker’s state of mind: wants to exist in a time vacuum

  • End stopped at the end of the stanza draws attention to the first explicit mention of time. Gives reader time to comprehend the big ideas introduced at the end of each stanza’s

  • The speakers sense of her own power is intense in the first two stanzas ‘i could have made the sun arise’, ‘i made the rising moon go back’

  • The alliteration of the liquid ‘l’s creates a smooth and soft sound in the speaker’s movement and also elongates the line - ‘like a long black’, as well as creating an image of the night trailing in her wake

  • The imagery used to describe the oncoming presence of night ‘the night unrolled across the countryside’ gives a sense of immensity about the nocturnal landscape, this places us in the Australian Outback, and it seems that night and road have become one

  • The use of ‘bright’ presents a contradictory image of the speaker during towards their future, but also wanting to stop time

  • ‘Whizzed along wires’ - the use of alliteration creates a sense of urgency and rushing, this suggests she wishes to fight the onslaught of time

  • Dynamic verbs whizzed / fly/ loomed/slipped give a sense of a sudden lurching movement.

  • ‘Days that fly too fast’ / ‘loomed up like years’ creates a sense of regret and mourning for all the time that has already slipped past

  • The repetition of ‘and’ throughout the poem creates a sense of momentum - particularly towards the end

  • The final stanza shows a transcendent fusing of all her senses and thoughts -rhythmic layering gives a sense of timelessness and strange contentment

The Poem

I made the rising moon go back
behind the shouldering hill,
I raced along the eastern track
till time itself stood still.

The stars swarmed on behind the trees,
but I sped fast at they,
I could have made the sun arise,
and night turn back to day.

And like a long black carpet
behind the wheels, the night
unrolled across the countryside,
but all ahead was bright.

The fence-posts whizzed along wires
like days that fly too fast,
and telephone poles loomed up like years
and slipped into the past.

And light and movement, sky and road
and life and time were one,
while through the night I rushed and sped,
I drove towards the sun.