Marianne Boruchs Year in Hawaii :: Marianne Boruch Year Hawaii Essays

Marianne Boruch's Year in Hawaii In her poem, â€Å"Year In Hawaii,† Marianne Boruch effectively portrays the feeling of an endless, motionless setting. This lyric poem attempts to transcend time by working with timelessness. The key lines to the poem take place at the very beginning, â€Å"The ocean takes so long/to think about.† Immediately the reader is met with mixed sensations of timelessness as well as restlessness. There’s a dreamy, sluggish feel to her wording. Using the ocean is perfect for evoking this, as looking out at the water, â€Å"Distance stops; one sees the endless line/of something.† So much empty space rolling out and out until it meets the sky. Boruch goes on to make her stance even clearer, â€Å"I was a toad/there, a river thing that got lost.† She places herself as a small, tiny creature that has no grasp of how big its surroundings are. After setting the mood in this tropical haven, Boruch makes a point to explain, â€Å"I never had a vision/about the place. I never thought: this/is the beginning of the world.† Boruch lets the reader know this is not a dream world, this is not something that can be conjured up in the mind and cradled whenever desired. Her time in Hawaii is something that she could have never imagined. This helps the flow of the poem, as she then depicts how easily pleased humans are. â€Å"You’ve seen/the postcards. People buy them thinking/everything worthwhile comes/through a camera lens, and they put them/in a pocket or down the dark throat/of a mailbox someone later opens/with a key.† Finding themselves in this unimaginable tropical island, humans try to capture the unexplainable on a piece of paper and bring it home to their safe comforts. Going back to the running theme of restlessness, Boruch portrays the human desire to be able to see the beauty of this landscape and the resulting unawareness of how unattainable it is. Amazed, they get there and think it is a material thing, believing that a simple postcard will do justice to their paradise. Even though she seems to be depicting a ‘paradise’ mind, Boruch immediately switches over to an ‘everyday’ mind. She describes the natives, â€Å"wanting just to live there, thank you,/going off to work and coming back, normal/things.† It’s as though the natives bring the poem back into time again, while the tourists had been stuck in timelessness.