17 pages • 34 minutes read
Thom GunnOn the Move
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1994A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Form and Meter
The meter of “On the Move” is largely iambic pentameter: the most common meter in English poetry. An iamb is a poetic foot in which an unstressed syllable is followed by a stressed syllable. A pentameter consists of five poetic feet. Line 20 is a strong example of an iambic pentameter: “They scare a flight of birds across the field.” Sometimes there is an extra, unstressed syllable at the end of the line. This is known as a feminine ending, as in the following two lines: “The blue jay scuffling in the bushes follows” (Line 1), and “That spurts across the field, the wheeling swallows” (Line 3).
Sometimes, to create variety, Gunn modifies the basic iambic rhythm. Line 10, for example, begins with two stressed syllables (“Small, black”). This type of foot is known as a spondee. Gunn also makes use of trochaic feet. A trochee is a poetic foot in which the first syllable is stressed, and the second is unstressed. (It is therefore the reverse of an iamb.) This can be seen in the inversion of the first foot in Line 12: “Bulges to thunder”; the same occurs in Line 31: “Choosing it.”
The rhyme scheme is the same in each stanza. In Stanza 1, for example, the end of Line 1 (“follows”) rhymes with the end of Line 3 (“swallows”); Line 2 (“birds”) rhymes with Line 8 (“words”); Line 4 (“undergrowth”) rhymes with Line 5 (“both”); and Line 6 (“violence”) rhymes with Line 7 (“sense”). The rhyme scheme is thus slightly unusual, given that five lines intervene between the two rhyming Lines 2 and 8. The pattern can be presented as ABACCDDB. Gunn occasionally uses partial or imperfect rhyme, such as in Lines 12 and 13, in which the vowel sounds in “thigh” and “impersonality” (the final syllable) are different. This happens again in Lines 33 and 35, with “go” and “through.”
Caesura and Enjambment
A caesura is a pause within a poetry line, indicated by punctuation. The use of a caesura provides variety and emphasis. Exactly half of the 40 lines in the poem contain a caesura, and some lines contain more than one. Gunn also uses enjambment in which a phrase is incomplete at the end of a line and continues into the next line, completing the syntactical unit. The reader must continue to the next line to understand the full meaning. Enjambment occurs in the first two lines: “The blue jay scuffling in the bushes follows / Some hidden purpose.” The reader must move to Line 2 to find out what the blue jay is following.
Imagery and Figurative Language
The poem offers quite a sharp contrast between the concrete and the abstract. There is vivid imagery of birds and the motorcyclists contrasting with the abstract language used to convey the existential theme of constant movement toward self-definition. The images, as one would expect, are not static. The birds are in flight before they nestle in the bushes. The motorcycles are in motion too, and from a distance the motorcyclists are described in a simile: “Small, black, as flies hanging in heat.” (In a simile, which can usually be recognized by the introductory words “like” or “as,” one thing is compared to a different thing in a way that identifies a similarity between them.) The imagery of the motorcyclists and their riders is both visual and aural. Their appearance is described, with their “goggles” (Line 13) and their “gleaming jackets” (Line 14), and it is accompanied by the sound of the motorcycles which builds from a “hum” (Line 11) to “thunder” (Line 12). This is emphasized again in Line 16 (“their noise”).
