Facing It Walt McDonald I suppose you turn on the horizon, expecting me, both of you on tiptoe, others bumping past like pilgrims. That time when I was five at the Royal Gorge comes back to haunt me, wandering off across that swaying bridge a thousand feet over the fast, white-water Arkansas. While my father checked the oil and water and Mother spread sandwiches in the shade and made my brothers help, I leaned and spat at that deep drop-off, watched the white foam arc and shine until gone. Cars chugged behind me, old cars that would have to last four years more during World War II. Don’t fall, some mother called, and I heard my mother also calling Walt, don’t fall! from back on the canyon rim, helpless as if afraid her weight might snap the cables with me precarious and trapped. Two decades later, I banked an Air Force jet at 20,000’ and snapped the camera at that bridge an inch long at an arm’s length to show you it was nothing. I held the wingtips vertical, spiraled down to 500’ above the crowd, nudged the throttle and climbed until the bridge was an inch, a quarter inch. I hummed and held ten thousand pounds of power in my fist. I flew to Saigon a decade later and came back to the scramble of surviving, to children running and tumbling over dangerous bridges I’d never crossed, and to my aging father and mother almost gone, the drawbridge rising while I stood helpless and waving a few yards away. |
1 Who is the speaker? What kind
of person is the speaker?
The speaker of the poem is the poet, Walt McDonald. As a young man, McDonald
served as an Air Force pilot and taught at the Air Force Academy. He was greatly
inspired by his pilot days and they were his reason to begin writing poetry.
In the poem, Walt feels nostalgia for his childhood days when his parents
were very involved and caring, but also, as he looks back on his life, he
is saddened by the thought that he has grown so far apart from his aging parents.
2 Is there an identifiable audience for the speaker? What can
we know about it?
The audience of the speaker changes during the poem. In the first and fourth
stanzas, the speaker addresses two people, most likely his father and mother,
directly, but throughout the rest of the poem, he talks of them in the third
person, making the general reader the audience. However, throughout the poem
the audience of the speaker, the general reader, can be both parents and children
at the same time because each can learn much about the importance of relationships.
Even though McDonald presents his memory to the reader, he himself is his
own audience, telling a story to and for himself in a moment of personal recollection.
3 What is the occasion?
The speaker remembers a time when he ventures out on a bridge high above a
fast flowing river, careless and at ease. His parents called from the bank
for him not to fall, helpless and worried for one of their sons. Twenty years
later, he flies an Air Force jet over that same bridge and takes a picture
of it, showing his parents that it was “nothing,” at least compared
to such a perilous stunt as flying a jet. More than ten years after that,
he comes back from Vietnam to his aging parents, separated from them by yet
another, this time metaphorical bridge.
4 What is the setting in time?
The speaker makes reference to cars driving by, when he is on the bridge as
a small child, that would have to last through four more years of World War
II; therefore it is approximately 1940. When he flies over the bridge as a
young adult, two decades have past, making it about 1960. He then goes to
Vietnam and comes back about a decade later, making it roughly 1970 at the
end of the poem.
5 What is the setting in place?
When the speaker ventures out onto the bridge above the fast, white-water
Arkansas, his family is on the canyon rim having a picnic at the Royal Gorge,
which allows one to assume they are near Canyon City, Colorado, about an hour
from Colorado Springs.
6 What is the central purpose of the poem?
The poem conveys the progression of a relationship over time – the relationship
between a son and his parents. In the beginning of the relationship, when
the speaker is five years old, the mother expresses her maternal affection
for her son when he walks out on to a dangerous bridge. She calls to him,
feeling helpless, not wanting him to fall into the river. Twenty years later,
she cannot be as protective of her son as before, now that he is a fighter
pilot for the Air Force, a dangerous job indeed. The speaker even goes off
to war in Vietnam, and, like the physical distance that separates him from
his parents, their relationship has lessened in strength. By the time he returns
from the war, his parents are almost gone and he now feels helplessly separated
from them by the rising drawbridge. This central purpose is achieved by the
contrast between the speaker’s experience as a child and the extremity
of his dangerous occupation.
7 State the central idea or theme of the poem in a sentence.
Although one feels the need to escape the protectiveness of his parents at
a young age, once he achieves this independence and increases the division,
time will have gone by faster than he expected and he will regret that the
strong relationship no longer exists.
8 Paraphrase the poem.
I assume that you are waiting for my return. I remember that time at the Royal
Gorge when I was five years old and I walked out onto the bridge that was
high above the Arkansas River.
I spat into the river as my mom and dad were preoccupied on the canyon rim.
I could hear cars behind me and I remember that World War II was going on
then.
I heard a woman call to me not to fall and so did my mother. She was very
scared that I would fall and she didn’t want to break the bridge by
walking out onto it.
Twenty years after that, I flew an Air Force jet above the same bridge and
took a picture of the miniscule thing to show you that it was not a big deal.
As I flew over that bridge I felt very powerful.
Ten years after that, I went to fight in Vietnam, and when I came back I saw
children that were less connected to their parents than I was to my parents.
I also came back to my dying mother and father and then I felt helpless.
9 Discuss the diction of the poem.
Helpless, in both uses of the word in the poem, is a particularly well-chosen
word. In the first occurrence, the mother feels helpless as her child wanders
on the precarious bridge. The second time the word shows up is when the speaker
himself feels helpless as he realizes the size of the separation between him
and his parents. In both cases, the word “helpless” actually helps
the reader feel the emotions of the speaker and his mother.
10 Discuss the imagery of the poem.
When the speaker describes the bridge that he as a five year old walked on,
he creates a terrifying image. A little child on a “swaying” bridge,
“a thousand feet over the fast, white-water” river. When reading
this segment, one almost feels queasy. When the speaker flies over the bridge
in the Air Force Jet, he takes a picture of it and it is only an inch long
and gets smaller as he flies further away. This image is meant to convey the
speaker's message that the instance on the bridge when he was a child, represented
by the diminishing bridge itself, is "nothing," unimportant now
that the speaker has "flown away." A third instance of imagery in
the poem is of another bridge. When the speaker comes home from the war in
Vietnam, he feels himself separated by a drawbridge. This bridge is significant
because the drawbridge is rising, representative of the unbridgeable gap that
has grown between the speaker and his parents as he has grown into adulthood.
11 Point out examples of figurative language.
In line three of the poem, simile is used: “others bumping past like
pilgrims.” This use of figurative language is appropriate because it
creates the carefree and indifferent attitude of the people walking past,
making the people awaiting the speaker seem to stand out in the image created
in the reader’s mind. Furthermore, the speaker labels the other people
that are bumping past as pilgrims because they are intent on moving from where
they are, either unsatisfied with their current location, or just wanting
to escape something they have to live with. In this way, the two people that
stand out from this crowd want to do the opposite, stay where they are and
"face it." This image also ties in with the title of the poem, "Facing
It." Simile is also used in the third stanza: “helpless as if afraid
her weight might snap the cables.” This use is effective because it
emphasizes the emotion of the speaker’s mother when he is out on the
unsteady bridge. A metaphor used in this poem is “I…held ten thousand
pounds of power in my fist.” This is very appropriate because, even
though he is not really holding that much in his hands, it accentuates the
control that he has over the jet. This is also an example of metonymy because
the power that he holds in his fists represents the entire Air Force plane
in general, not just the actual joystick that he grasps. Another metaphor
is when the speaker says, “children running and tumbling/over dangerous
bridges I’d never crossed.” Although he most likely did not actually
see kids traversing more dangerous bridges than the one he went on over the
Royal Gorge, the metaphor shows that three decades after his childhood, children
are even more disconnected from their parents than he was as a kid.
12 Point out and explain symbols.
The drawbridge at the end of the poem symbolized the separation that the speaker
feels from his parents, who are on the opposite side of the bridge, now that
he has grown up and they are older. It is also not a coincidence that a bridge
is what separated him from his parents when he was only five years old.
13 Point out and explain examples of paradox, overstatement, understatement,
and irony. What is their function?
One instance of overstatement is when the speaker says, “I…held
ten thousand pounds of power in my fist.” As the pilot of the jet, he
didn’t actually hold five tons in his hands; instead he controlled all
of that weight with the joystick he was holding. In this way, the overstatement
functions to emphasize how dangerous and important his role as the pilot of
such a powerful plane really was. It also shows the increasing separation
between him and his mother who, at one point, was afraid of her son walking
on a bridge, and who now has to accept that her son has such a dangerous job.
One instance of paradox is in the last stanza when the speaker states, “the
scramble of surviving.” One does not usually consider surviving a particularly
difficult activity to carry out, but in this case the speaker finds life back
at home to be more challenging than fighting a war in Southeast Asia.
14 Point out and explain any allusions.
In the final stanza of the poem the speaker says that he “flew to Saigon
a decade later.” Even though he might have in fact flown to Saigon,
what the speaker really means is that he went to fight in Vietnam.
15 What is the tone of the poem? How is it achieved?
The tone of the poem is of both pride and nostalgia. The speaker is very proud
that he has grown up and is able to fly fighter jets, becoming more independent
from his mother. But, at the same time, he reminisces about the separation
that has grown between him and his aging parents. The tone of pride and independence
is achieved when the speaker explains the power and control he has while flying
the jet over the bridge. Also, the speaker takes a picture of the tiny bridge
from the plane to show that “it was nothing.” The tone of nostalgia
is conveyed at the end of the poem when he stands on the opposite side of
the drawbridge as his parents. At this point, he is the helpless one, waving
to his father and mother who are almost gone.
16 Describe the form, pattern, or meter of the poem.
The poem consists of five stanzas of seven lines each. Other than this basic
structure, the poem is formless free verse. The poem is not a rhyming poem
and does not have a specific meter. While the ideas established in the last
lines of stanzas two, three, and four all carry into the next stanza, this
does not occur in stanza one. The poet did this intentionally in order for
the poem to flow in a way that is congruous with the content of the poem.
In the first stanza, the speaker talks of an event occurring in the present,
when his connection with his parents is already distant. In the following
three stanzas, the content is primarily a recollection of how this connection
gradually became distant. Therefore, the transitions at the end of the second,
third, and fourth stanzas flow into the following stanza because this separation
grew with each successive event, while the first stanza stands alone as an
introduction to the despair felt by the speaker.
17 Explain the poem's significance to you.
"Facing It," by Walt McDonald, is very significant to me because
of the message that I receive from it. The poem is about a man who looks back
on his life and realizes that his relationship with his parents has thinned
over the years. I can associate with this feeling because, even though I am
significantly younger than the man in the poem, I still feel that I am constantly
moving farther away from my parents, both figuratively and in reality. As
I grow older, I do things farther away from home, and it continually becomes
harder to maintain the extremely strong relationship that I once had with
my mother and father.