Cherrylog Road
James Dickey’s poem “Cherrylog Road” is clearly an exhilarating, narrative poem. The speaker of this piece is a young man reminiscing of a secret tryst he had with a young girl. This is a provocative poem, told in the first person and is full of imagery, figurative language and symbolism. Actually it is about a class system of the past, racial prejudices, lust and empowerment.
The setting of this poem is in a rural part of an unnamed Southern state, off of Highway 96 at Cherrylog Road. It is at the peak of a summer afternoon in a junkyard full of discarded automobiles. As a result, the setting affects the reader’s perception of this poem by using a hot southern junkyard with an active sun that is “eating the paint in blisters …show more content…
The three building blocks would make the cars unsteady, just like the old southern ways. The tireless cars also symbolize the young man and his inability to move outside of his racial boundaries. The cars are symbolic of the southern tradition and southern people who want to keep the old Southern ways of life. Southern tradition is very strong in the “Old South”. The young man is not able to change the thinking of the Southern rural society, but he is risking a rebellion, of sort, with this forbidden interracial affair. Therefore the junkyard cars and this relationship between the speaker and the girl are going nowhere in this small southern …show more content…
She lives with her father on a farm near the Cherrylog Road. James Dickey makes a clear reference to the girl being Caucasian, when he denotes her father’s red hair and when he writes, “her back’s pale skin….” (Dickey James, page 931). The father is abusive and treats Doris as a kept animal. The poem tells readers that the father will “put the fear of God” in Doris if she goes against his rules. The razor strap, or strop, is a symbol of the beating the girl will receive if he finds out that she is having a liaison with a colored man. Moreover, Doris would not be the only one to feel the wrath of the father; he would seek out the main