Please help analyze this poem?

[13HunterZ]

It's called "The Middle Years" by Walter McDonald

These are the nights we dreamed of,
snow drifting over a cabin roof
in the mountains, enough stacked wood
and meat to last a week, alone at last

in a rented A-frame, isolated,
without power, high in the San Juan.
Our children are safe as they'll ever be
seeking their fortune in cities,

our desk and calendar clear, our debts
paid until summer. the smoke of pinon
seeps back inside under almost invisible
cracks, the better to smell it. All day

we take turns holding hands and counting
the years we never believed we'd make it-
the hours of skinned knees and pleading,
diapers and teenage rage and fever

in the middle of the night, and parents
dying, and Saigon, the endless guilt
of surviving. Nights, we lie touching
for hours and listen, the silent woods

so close we can hear owls diving.
These woods are not our woods,
tough we hold a key to dead pine planks
laid side by side, shiplap like a dream

that lasts, a double bed that fits us
after all these years, a blunt
front-feeding stove that gives back
temporary heat for all the logs we own.

This is how it appears on the handout I was given. So basically I have to analyze this poem and touch upon a couple of these things.

I noticed that with structure, the tone kind of changes where the dashed line is (after we never believed we'd make it) to something that's darker than what the tone was in the beginning. And I also notice that it could talk about life and how night can be symbolic of the end of a life.

But I'm wondering, what could the word "wood/woods" be symbolic of? It's constantly repeated so I figure it has to have some significance. And also, why else could it be called "The Middle Years"? One last thing is, why does he bring up Saigon?

Feel free to add any other ideas you might have.

Thanks so much!

[cafolini]

Never read this before. I think he's talking about the woods now in comparison to the woods in Vietnam. The latter are his woods, not these ones. In nam he thought, as most did, that they would never make it. But these are not his woods, not their woods.

[Nick Capozzoli]

Never read this before. I think he's talking about the woods now in comparison to the woods in Vietnam. The latter are his woods, not these ones. In nam he thought, as most did, that they would never make it. But these are not his woods, not their woods.

The jungles in Vietnam weren't (and aren't) much like the coniferous woods of the San Juan. He may or may not have been in VN; maybe he's referring to escaping South Vietnamese (from Saigon) who feel guilty about those they left behind, rather than soldiers who lost buddies back there.

[OrphanPip]

The jungles in Vietnam weren't (and aren't) much like the coniferous woods of the San Juan. He may or may not have been in VN; maybe he's referring to escaping South Vietnamese (from Saigon) who feel guilty about those they left behind, rather than soldiers who lost buddies back there.

I don't think he is appropriating the voice of Vietnamese diaspora, the "we" of the poem experiences camping in a pop-up A-frame as a child in San Juan, Texas, which might be a possible experience of a more recent generation of Vietnamese-Americans, but not of the generation that seems represented in the poem.

Anyway, I think the woods metaphor is being taken in the wrong way. The poem is certainly about middle age, thus the title. A little digging revealed that McDonald did serve for a year in Vietnam, probably in some capacity as an administrator in the air force, rather than in combat. His experience of loss would have been that of seeing his students (he taught at the Air Force Academy) and younger soldiers (he was nearing 40 by the time he went over) dying while he was in a position behind the front lines. This would better explain the sense of survivor's guilt, and importance of Saigon, where the US military operated from in Vietnam.

So, the importance of the woods is in relation to firewood and camping as an idealized experience of a mid-life couple. Being able to be happy and contended while camping in picturesque surroundings with your grown up kids off safe and sound pursuing their own lives. Instead the experience of those woods in actual mid life is one of worry and loss in the past, with moments of happy respite like the brief warmth of a stove. There is also what seems to be an obvious evocation of the prescience of their sense of mortality, the dead pine planks and double bed evoke a double grave since pine is often associated with coffins.

[cafolini]

Ignorance and blah-blah should not be left to speak as if it knew the facts. By the end of the war, the battle was fought very savagely around and inside Saigon, where the middle-aged author spent his year. Please don't babble when you don't know the history of the different dimensions and timings of the war in Vietnam.

[OrphanPip]

Ignorance and blah-blah should not be left to speak as if it knew the facts. By the end of the war, the battle was fought very savagely around and inside Saigon, where the middle-aged author spent his year. Please don't babble when you don't know the history of the different dimensions and timings of the war in Vietnam.

Whether he saw combat in Saigon as an officer in the air force or not, it still doesn't mean he would have spent any great deal of time struggling in jungle combat.

Relating the woods in the latter part of the poem to the jungle combat experienced in Vietnam seems a spurious association given the evidence in the poem, and the way that the wood is framed. He mentions Saigon and survivors guilt, that is standard part of having become middle age in post-Vietnam America, it doesn't mean the poem is about Vietnam. There is no mention of combat beyond that single line, and there is no jungle or combat imagery really in that final stanza.

Wood transforms in the poem from neatly packed firewood, to the pleasantly burning campfire, to the dead pine planks, and finally to the utilitarian firewood of a stove. I get why you read this as the mid years of the war, but that interpretation requires reading quite a lot into the final lines and makes the first half of the poem quite awkward. The dead pine planks evoke coffins, but they are literally a description of a cabin door, he's holding a key to a pine cabin with a stove inside. The course of wood in this poem is one of disillusionment, not particularly one of alien otherness that seemed implied by your interpretation.

Certainly we can ask why are the woods of mid-life different than the dream woods, and the post-Vietnam ethos is part of that, but it is also the experience of raising children and the loss of parents.

[Nick Capozzoli]

I like OrphanPip's interpretation based on the author's bio. It does make some of the references clearer. Without the bio info I was thinking that the author's
wife might have been a refugee...

[Peter Hall]

You should always give your response to a poem 'innocently' i.e. without seeing anyone else's critique. Of course you may change your view when you see other views - but first engage with the poet. I've never seen it before. So here goes.
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This is a poem treasuring a special experience in a shared life that has been an ongoing struggle, which has rarely given the couple the pleasure they always agreed on and wanted. They are 'alone at last' , but in their life they have been victims of parental responsibility
‘Our children are safe as they'll ever be
seeking their fortune in cities’
, industrialisation, war, debt, disease,
'the hours of skinned knees and pleading,
diapers and teenage rage and fever '

guilt, loss (probably early) of beloved parents, and general insecurity –
'the years we never believed we'd make it'.

In their 'rented A-frame, isolated, without power' they taste a rare freedom. And, above all in this poem, they share it.

It might not be obvious but this is a deep love poem. Look for the word ‘I’ and you won’t find it. Look for the word ‘we’ and it is everywhere. These now middle-aged lovers have had little control over their lives. But now they have a temporary freedom –
‘our desk and calendar clear, our debts
paid until summer’
The freedom is temporary – in the summer they will be shackled to their economic circumstances again, but it is all the more valued; for a short time:
‘These are the nights we dreamed of’

We should not not mistake this for a poem about the Vietnamese war, though Saigon is significant to at least one, and maybe both, of the couple. ‘The endless guilt of surviving’ is surely an experience of the war, another scar on their lives. But this is a poem in which a middle-aged couple, sharing
‘ a double bed that fits us
after all these years’
Find a moment of shared joy –
‘we take turns to hold hands’

For all that they have been through has clearly not reduced their love or respect – it has increased it, it seems. This can happen when people find their way together through an undesired life. And now, in this moment of respite, it is celebrated.

I have barely scratched the surface of this wonderful poem.

[ennison]

He's a damn lucky bugger.

[cafolini]

Veterans don't usually speak much about the war because this are the kinds of responses they get from people who know nothing about it. What does their love have to do with their momentary life in that cabin?