Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

"Cherrylog Road" by James Dickey is a vivid and dynamic poem that explores themes of youthful desire, rebellion, and escape through a narrative set in a junkyard. The poem masterfully combines sensory detail, motion, and emotion to paint a portrait of a clandestine encounter, capturing both the intensity of young love and the backdrop of decay against which it unfolds.

The poem begins with the speaker entering various old cars in a junkyard off Highway 106, each vehicle described in vivid detail, from a '34 Ford "smothered in kudzu" to an Essex with a "rumble seat of red leather." This setting is not just a collection of discarded objects; it is a landscape charged with potential and memory, each car holding a trace of its own past life and story. The act of entering and exiting these cars is almost ritualistic, suggesting a preparation or anticipation for what is to come.

The junkyard is animated with life and imagination. Ordinary objects transform into living creatures—a radiator cap becomes a "real toad or a kingsnake" as the speaker delves deeper into the heart of this mechanical graveyard. This transformation underscores the poem's atmosphere of enchantment and danger, a place where the ordinary becomes extraordinary, and every corner holds the potential for metamorphosis.

The narrative tension builds with the anticipation of Doris Holbrook's arrival. She is expected to escape from the confines of her father's farm to meet the speaker in this secret, sun-beaten haven of rust and memories. The description of Doris is one of action and agency; she is not just arriving but actively participating in the scene, "Loosening the screws, / Carrying off headlights, / Sparkplugs, bumpers," suggesting her readiness to dismantle and perhaps to rebuild, not just the physical objects but her circumstances and perhaps her life.

The climax of the poem occurs in the "long Pierce-Arrow," a space that holds a charged intimacy, protected and hidden by the "glass panel in between / Lady and colored driver." This panel, "not all the way broken out," symbolizes the barriers of race, class, and social expectation that the young lovers are transgressing. Their rendezvous in the back seat, amidst the "gray breathless batting," becomes a moment of defiance and liberation, set against the oppressive heat and the potential violence of Doris’s father, evoked through the vivid image of a "string-triggered 12-gauge shotgun."

The poem concludes with the lovers parting ways, "leaving by separate doors," a line that resonates with the secrecy and perhaps the fleeting nature of their union. The speaker's escape on his motorcycle, "drunk on the wind in my mouth," captures a sense of exhilaration and an almost reckless embrace of freedom, "Wild to be wreckage forever." This final image ties back to the setting of the junkyard, suggesting a kinship with the abandoned cars—a desire to be unbound, even if it means becoming like the wreckage around him.

"Cherrylog Road" is a powerful evocation of youthful passion set against the backdrop of a Southern landscape marked by both beauty and decay. Dickey uses the junkyard as a metaphor for both the constraints of the societal and personal histories that shape us and the human capacity for reinvention and rebellion. The poem pulses with the rhythms of desire and the urgency of escape, capturing a moment that is both timeless and transient.

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