Travel

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1921

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

Identity

“Travel” contains a highly-organized poetic structure, yet the speaker’s character development is sparse to negligible. Millay made specific choices to omit the characteristics of the speaker’s identity. There is no indication of name, age, sex, race, or marital status, which coincides with the existential questions of purpose resonant in the Lost Generation and the bohemian rejection of materialism in favor of experience. Millay was at the center of Greenwich Village, and much of her literary work deals with issues of gender. If the speaker is indeed a woman, the question of identity becomes more far-reaching, as many women lost their identities in motherhood and marriage, while simply being defined as “spinster” until then. The 1920s brought liberation to some parts of women’s lives, but traditional gender roles and motherhood remained institutionalized by society. In the end, Millay leaves it to the reader to form conclusions of identity. The speaker is purposely inaccessible but speaks to an underlying, universal human desire and experience.

Isolation and Stasis

Millay addresses the theme of isolation with a controlled sparseness. Place is both disembodied and bustling in the poem, and the speaker seems both within and distanced from everyday life. Millay reveals very little about where the speaker actually is. There is no indication of buildings or streets. There is no mention of family, spouse, or children. Everything is relayed through sense. In Stanzas 1 and 2, the speaker notes the sounds of people talking (Line 2) and of the train (Line 4), as well as the sights of the train far away (Lines 7-8). The reader has no sense if the speaker is within the crowd or observing from a non-descript, fixed point. Millay’s choice of ambiguity places the speaker in a vacuum—with no definition of town or city, and no relationship defined between them. In doing so, the reader shares this isolation and is fixed in the senses: listening and observing, waking and dreaming, wishing and lamenting, with no way out of the loop.

The enduring isolation in the poem leads to a fundamental lack of advancement. The title “Travel” brings a deep irony for the speaker, who seems indelibly stuck in whatever space they are in. Despite the turn in the third stanza—the focus shifting from the time of day and trains to friends made and never made—there is no movement for the speaker. Days, nights, and trains pass, and the speaker is in the same undefined space. The voice emits a feeling of being trapped; they can hear and see the train, but they can never get close enough to it. This creates a push and pull throughout the poem: There is so much movement surrounding the speaker, yet there is no way to join that movement. There is no answer as to why the speaker cannot access the train, and without detail of place and identity, there is a sense of void.

Exploration

“Travel” is marked by a deep longing for exploration that was reminiscent of the 1920s, almost exclusively reserved for men. Women were not encouraged to explore wanderlust, despite the gains of suffragists and First-Wave feminists. Perhaps this is what makes Millay’s approach to this theme so dynamic. Much of the travel-focused literature canon from the early-20th century focuses on writers such as Ernest Hemmingway, Jack London, John Steinbeck, and a few decades later, Jack Kerouac. These celebrated male writers similarly dealt with identity and place and with much aplomb. The 1920s brought a romance with nomadism, with male drifters who “rode the rails and slept in jails,” seeing the United States from the last train car (Beaulieu, Sara-Anne. “Ride the Rails and Sleep in Jails.”). Unlike the bold explorers of such literature, the speaker in “Travel” stands out. There is a need to leave one’s locale. It’s there in the day and at night. It’s in dreams and in the reddish plumes of train smoke. It’s lamented in the relationships never made. That desire, however, is never satisfied.