In Montana: Exotic
by Gwendolen Haste
(published in Poetry, January 1924)
Her frightened soul shrank
When she saw
The bitter crumbling hills of shale.
And the high cutback,
Gashed and raw,
Struck her eyes like the wall of a jail.
The years ran by
Indifferent,
And she never grew used to unfenced land,
Nor dust blown high,
Nor scrub pines bent
In the midst of shuffling wastes of sand.
When her years were told
Her voice was sour
And her eyes were as hard as small black beads.
Her mouth was cold
And twisted dour,
For her soul had withered like last year’s weeds.
I have lived in many places and I have traveled a lot in the US. I know the feeling of feeling comfortable and at home in a place, but I also know the opposite feeling, which Haste describes in her poem.
Haste was a midwesterner, living in Indiana, Wisconsin, and Illinois. After graduating from the University of Chicago in 1912, she moved to Montana; she left in 1924 to move to New York.
She wrote many of her poems while living in Montana--her sense of not fitting in seemed to spark her creativity.
I like this poem not only for the topic, but for her word play. The rhymes are not forced and she uses other techniques throughout, especially alliteration (the repetition of sounds at the beginning of words) and consonance (the repetition of specific consonants in words).
Her language in general tells us what the speaker is feeling; the words describing the landscape are harsh: bitter, gashed, raw, dust, waste, sour, cold, twisted, dour, withered, and weeds. The speaker believes this environment is doing more than just making her sad--it is killing her soul.
Haste worked for General Foods and died in 1979. Her papers are collected and held in a number of libraries, and her poems are in a few books, the last one publushed in 1978. Some sources spell her name "Gwendolyn," but Poetry spells it the way I have here.
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