Memoranda
Memoranda - meaning Summary
Farewell to the Prairie
The speaker moves through a rural scene and responds to ordinary natural details as if saying farewell. Small images — a handful of grass, a quarter-mile field, prairie roses in a ditch — widen into a sense of empty gardens, ghostly fields, and absent human presence. The poem registers transience and solitude: landscape elements echo human gestures, while the speaker pronounces a "useless good-by" to an indifferent world.
Read Complete AnalysesTHIS handful of grass, brown, says little. This quarter mile field of it, waving seeds ripening in the sun, is a lake of luminous firefly lavender. Prairie roses, two of them, climb down the sides of a road ditch. In the clear pool they find their faces along stiff knives of grass, and cat-tails who speak and keep thoughts in beaver brown. These gardens empty; these fields only flower ghosts; these yards with faces gone; leaves speaking as feet and skirts in slow dances to slow winds; I turn my head and say good-by to no one who hears; I pronounce a useless good-by.
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