Time-Travel by Sharon Olds
"Time-Travel" by Sharon Olds explores themes of memory, family dynamics, and personal trauma through the lens of a nostalgic journey into the past. The poem begins with the speaker reflecting on her ability to revisit her childhood, specifically a summer in 1955, as she searches for her father in a lake house setting. The imagery of doors and windows serves as symbols of perspective and escape, highlighting the speaker's careful navigation through her memories.
As the speaker encounters her father, who is asleep and seemingly at peace after a drinking episode, the poem reveals the complexity of their relationship. The family is portrayed as fractured, with the mother in distress and siblings escaping to their own distractions. The adult speaker's poignant meeting with her younger self by the lake represents a confrontation with her own pain and innocence amidst familial strife. The conclusion of the poem emphasizes resilience and survival, suggesting that the young girl will ultimately endure despite her tumultuous environment. This layered narrative invites readers to reflect on the intricacies of memory and the lasting impact of one's upbringing.
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Time-Travel by Sharon Olds
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1980 (collected in Satan Says, 1980)
Type of work: Poem
The Work
“Time-Travel” is a good introduction to Olds’s use of themes concerning her painful past. The title and the poem’s first sentence explain what is happening. The speaker says she has learned to return to the past in order to find doors and windows. The meaning of those apertures is made clear at the poem’s end, but the reader recognizes them already as typical means of enlarging one’s view or of escaping.
The next lines place the poem in time—a hot summer day in 1955. The setting seems to be a lake house, perhaps a vacation cabin, for it has pine walls and a splintery pine floor. The speaker says that she is looking for her father in this time travel, and her slow, deliberate tracing of her steps from small room to big (she even notes the doorway she passes through) suggests the elaborate care, perhaps because of fear or uncertainty, that she is using in this search. When she finds him, it is as if she stumbles over something inert lying on a chair.
The second stanza explains that the father is asleep, sleeping off a drinking bout. Once again, Olds leads the reader carefully through the picture, suggesting reasons for her care. She can somehow own her father, possess him, in this state. She shows him as he sleeps, newspaper comics on his stomach, plaid shirt, hands folded across his body. He looks almost dead. She describes his looks in some detail, but all of his physical characteristics are dependent on the central thing she has explained—that this “solid secret body” is “where he puts the bourbon.” The care with which she has searched for him is partly caused by fear of waking him. The stanza ends with the information that this is the family’s last summer together and that the speaker has learned to walk very quietly that summer, so that no one will be aware of her. The second stanza is enjambed into the third so that a stanza break occurs in the middle of the sentence after the word “walk,” which hangs at the line’s end like a careful footstep.
The third stanza locates the other members of this unhappy family. The mother is weeping upstairs. The brother, like the other children in the family, has escaped to the outdoors. He is in a tent, reading the speaker’s diary. The older sister is “changing boyfriends somewhere in a car.” Only the father seems really at peace; ironically, he is described as a baby, suggesting a sort of infantile quality in his relationship with his family.
The stanza ends with a reference to a twelve-year-old girl who is down by the lake, watching its waves. The speaker approaches her, and the girl turns to face her; the child is the speaker’s young self, who looks up toward the house as if she does not see the speaker but must concentrate on the pain going on in her family. The adult speaker identifies her as the one she was seeking. She looks into the girl’s eyes and sees waves that are somehow a cross between the lake’s water and the air of hell. The poem concludes by explaining what the young girl cannot know: that this pain will have an end and that, of all of her family, she will be the survivor. Once again at the poem’s end, Olds makes special use of a line break, ending the next-to-last line after “one” so that “survivor” rests all alone—like the girl herself—in its line. The line break also creates a sort of pun in the next-to-last line, which says that the girl does not know that “she is the one”—as if, in addition to being the “one” survivor, she has been singled out for some other special gift, a gift she will not recognize until much later.
Bibliography
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Kirsch, Adam. “The Exhibitionist.” The New Republic 221 (December 27, 1999): 38.
Lesser, Rika. “Knows Father Best.” The Nation 255 (December 14, 1992): 748-750.
McGiveron, Rafeeq. “Olds’s ’Sex Without Love.’” The Explicator 58 (Fall, 1999): 60.
“Sharon Olds.” The Writer 114 (April, 2001): 66.
Swiontkowski, Gale. Imagining Incest: Sexton, Plath, Rich, and Olds on Life with Daddy. Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 2003.
Tucker, Ken. “Family Ties.” The New York Times Book Review 104 (November 14, 1999): 29.
Wineapple, Brenda. “I Have Done This Thing.” Poetry 185 (December, 2004): 232-237.
Zeider, Lisa. Review of The Father, by Sharon Olds. The New York Times Book Review, March 21, 1993, 14.