Arrival at Santos

To me, this is a poem of becoming. It begins with the sort of wrestling between wanting to be there and not wanting to be there. Eager for the shore but not sure she likes what she sees. It seems the speaker is arguing with herself, that we are present as readers for an inner dialogue. This inner dialogue is a major device for the poem. It draws me into its thinking like I’m privy to the private thoughts in her mind. Don’t we scold ourselves sometimes the way she does in the “Oh tourist” line?

It’s interesting to me that the deeper she gets into the scene the more she loses her early reticence. Referring to the tender as “strange and ancient” conveys a sort of curious interest. And she seems even more enthralled by Miss Breen in the encounter with her. I like the funny contrast between the speaker’s “immodest” demands and the accidental lack of modesty in having Miss Breen’s undergarments publicly displayed when the hook lifts her skirt. 

I find it interesting too that I didn’t notice the rhyme scheme until the stanza with Miss Breen. I wonder if this is a part of the formal vs. casual duality Gerry mentions in his write-up. Once I noticed the rhyme, the poem began to sound more ordered, perhaps dovetailing the speaker’s own development toward being at peace with her arrival at port.

In the end she seems to be leaving a former life and diving from surface to core, both geographically and personally. She sets this up in the first stanza by giving the land’s physical features human attributes. How often when we meet a light-hearted other (like Miss Breen perhaps) do we look aghast upon our own internal “uglies”? This seems very real to me. By the end of the poem, the speaker seems ready to shed what “does not matter” and experience, embrace even, what lies immediately ahead in her life.