"At the San Francisco Airport" by Yvor Winters

Yvor Winters was born October 17, 1900 in Chicago but moved to California for his childhood. He attended the University of Chicago, the University of Colorado, and Stanford. During this time, he overcame tuberculosis, worked as a poet, and also taught. Winters met his wife, Janet Lewis, at college who also became poet. In 1961, he was awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry for his peice Collected Poems. He died January 25, 1968.

To my daughter, 1954

This is the terminal: the light

Gives perfect vision, false and hard;

The metal glitters, deep and bright.

Great planes are waiting in the yard—

They are already in the night.

And you are here beside me, small,

Contained and fragile, and intent

On things that I but half recall—

Yet going whither you are bent.

I am the past, and that is all.

But you and I in part are one:

The frightened brain, the nervous will,

The knowledge of what must be done,

The passion to acquire the skill

To face that which you dare not shun.

The rain of matter upon sense

Destroys me momently. The score:

There comes what will come. The expense

Is what one thought, and something more—

One’s being and intelligence.

This is the terminal, the break.

Beyond this point, on lines of air,

You take the way that you must take;

And I remain in light and stare—

In light, and nothing else, awake.

The title establishes the setting of poem to be at the airport. The connotation of an airport presents a vast variety of possibilities occurring. These possibilities would be that someone is either leaving or returning home or someone is there to witness another arrive or depart. The first stanza describes the terminal itself with a sense of awe at the lights, the metal, and the planes. It also states that the temporal setting is night which has a negative connotation. Not only does night often foreshadow an unfortunate event taking pace, but the darkness also creates a sense of mystery, or unsureness of what may come. Clearly, second stanza is focused on the speaker’s daughter, made evident by her description with delicate words. Therefore, the mother feels protective that her daughter is leaving, for she believes she could be too young. At the same time, though, the mother recognizes she must leave to find her own future, and in the third stanza, she notes the features of her daughter that remind her of herself. The fourth stanza demonstrates the pain the mother is feeling as she watches her daughter leave with powerful words such as “destroys me.” The final stanza contains the daughter departing and the mother staying behind in the light. By beginning this stanza the same as the first, the author compares the darkness of night and the light she is under. The daughter is leaving into the darkness, an uncertain path that can take her any way she chooses. The mother stands in the light with no more uncertainty in the direction her life is heading.