Nineteen

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1990

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Symbols & Motifs

Nineteen

The poem’s title illustrates that it is set in a particular—and significant—time in the speaker’s life, the last period of her teenage years. Her 19th summer symbolizes a portal to the larger world, as well as a break from childhood. At the beginning of the second stanza, the speaker asserts her age during that significant summer once again, stating, “At nineteen it was my first summer away from home” (Line 9). Here, 19 marks a movement away from the familiar, safe, and somehow bland world of home.

The speaker’s recalled youth is central to the poem’s mood and premise. In the first stanza, she notes that she was “the baby” (Line 4) among her friends, drinking rum and coke while they smoked marijuana. She notes that she was a “fool” (Line 12) in love, implying her naivete and idealism. Her curiosity and questions also symbolize her youthfulness. At the same time, she takes charge of her life like a grown-up, forging a new relationship, staying away from home, and experimenting with her newfound freedom. Thus, 19 also symbolizes a threshold between the speaker’s child and adult selves.

Marijuana

A running motif in the poem, marijuana in one sense symbolizes the grown-up world to which the lover belongs and in which the speaker’s younger self delves that summer. In another sense, it represents an escape for the lover, his way of coping with reality. The speaker notes that while the lover and his friends “smoked reefer” (Line 5), she, being younger, drank rum and coke. Reefers—an informal plural term for cannabis cigarettes or joints—are thus the domain of the older men. By keeping her away from reefers, the men are simultaneously excluding her and protecting her. This implies the men know their world of marijuana, and the reality they try to escape through it, is still too complicated for the youthful, idealistic speaker.

In Stanza 2, the speaker notes that the lover knew everything about marijuana. The speaker then describes the care and precision with which the lover deals with the substance. This makes it clear that smoking marijuana is more than an occasional pastime for the lover. Significantly, he learned about marijuana in Vietnam. Though the poem doesn’t make explicit how or why the lover picked up the habit in that particular place, the reader can infer that marijuana could be a way for soldiers to bond with each other and, more crucially, to deal with the horrors of the war around them. In this context, the lover’s attention to marijuana gains more meaning. He pays so much attention to cannabis because it diverts him from his memories of battle.

The Rain on the Roof

Seen through the speaker’s eyes, the lover appears charming, sneaky, and evasive. He seduces the speaker by asking if he can steal a kiss from her, carries on the affair despite being older and married, and refuses to answer her questions about Vietnam. In fact, when her questions seem to overwhelm him, he “grabbed / between [her] legs” (Lines 20-21), implying he uses her body to divert both himself and her. When he does talk about Vietnam, it is in terms of elision, describing the things which he used to cope with his time there, such as marijuana and the music of Marvin Gaye. It is only at the end of the poem that the lover’s slick exterior briefly crumbles and his evasive tactics fail. The trigger for this moment is the sudden downpour hitting the roof of the camper in which the speaker and the lover are sleeping.

The tactile reality of the rain—its sharp sound and sudden descent—catches the lover unawares in the unguarded moment of sleep. Thus, he doesn’t have the time to be evasive or to put up defenses. He shoots up straight at the rain’s suddenness, implying he is in a state of instinctive response. For a moment, the man thinks he is in Vietnam, which puts him in a heightened state. This shows that his experiences there were intense and traumatic. In a rare moment of honesty, he tells the speaker that the rain “sounded just like that […] on the roofs there” (Line 25). In the poem, the rain symbolizes a critical break, a moment of pain and release, as well as an epiphany, both for its characters and the readers.