Boarded and Caged: Ideas of Freedom in Warren Pryor - Essay Example

Number Your 3 March 2007 Boarded and Caged: Ideas of Freedom in "Warren Pryor" Parents usually have high ideals for their children, and often specific visions of what it will take for their offspring to achieve success. At the same time, young people have their own ideas about what the want in life. Rarely do these match, which is the central concept in the poem "Warren Pryor" by Alden Nowlan. A parent's idea of success may not work for a child. In this poem, images of bondage illustrate how the idea of freedom differs between generations. To the parents' credit, it is obvious that they want their son to have a better life than they did. They are hardscrabble farmers, and we know that they consider this life a kind of imprisonment based on the statement that they are "slaving to free him from the stony fields." Fertile farms aren't full of stones, and the life of a farmer on a farm that is not particularly prosperous is difficult. The poet says it "bore them down," so we understand that they feel the weight of their toil and sense that they are trapped in it themselves. They feel they are slaves. However, they believe they are working to free their son, and so the "sacrifice" required to procure "every pencil" is, to them, a gift to offer their child a way to spread his wings and leave the farm. This imagery recurs in other stanzas. The boy's graduation from school represents, to them, the unlocking of a final gate. His diploma is "his passport from the years of brutal toil and lonely patience in a barren hole," without which he would be stuck, just as they are, as dirt farmers. For them, physical labor is "brutal toil" and the open fields are more accurately "a barren hole." Trapped under the weight of their world, they cannot imagine it as anything beyond a cruel bond that keeps them tied down to the earth. Their farm, we understand, does not earn them much money; like many farmers, they are probably saddled with debt, although the poem does not make this explicit. Instead, the parents celebrate the boy's escape, proud that they've managed to save him "from their thistle-strewn farm and its red dirt." To them, anything is better than being captives of an unresponsive piece of land. However, the poet wants us to understand that they have traded one kind of bondage for another. The boy is "boardedat a school in town," much in the same way that a horse is boarded in a stable. We can suppose that a boy living in a school has less freedom than one on a farm. Although a farm boy may have more responsibilities and harder chores, he probably also has acres in which to run, trees to climb, ponds to swim in. There is irony in the parents' happiness at his graduation, when they rejoice that they have spared their child, "years of brutal toil and lonely patience in a barren hole." It seems likely, based on the information we learn later in the poem, that the boy considered boarding school brutal, lonely, and barren. We can see another example of this irony in their admiration of his "milk-white shirt." As farmers, they see that shirt as a symbol of freedom from the dirt that holds them captive. But, as anyone who has ever worn a white, button-down Oxford knows, such clothing represents an entirely new set of restrictions: first, the restricted movement afforded by fitted, starched, clothing that buttons close at the neck and the wrists, and second, the restriction from dirt. If you must wear a white shirt, you must remain vigilant against the possibility of its being sullied. Although the parents want to be free from dirt, being completely free from something that exists in great quantities everywhere in the world is imprisonment of a different, and possibly more difficult, kind. In the final stanza, the boy's perspective comes to the fore. Supposedly free from the bondage of the land, his life as a banker represents a more confining prison. He is trapped even more firmly than his parents, caught "like a young bear insider his teller's cage." There is no line more telling than this. Whereas the parents are at least human in their bondage and have some choice as to motion throughout their workday, the boy has been reduced to an animal. Any sense of choice or possibility of movement has been taken from him; he is literally inside a cage five days a week. In working so ceaselessly to give him his freedom, his parents have trapped him even more firmly. To understand what the boy wants, we can look at the very end of the poem. His hands are "axe-hewn," but we know this is not a literal description, because he has probably had few opportunities to use large tools in boarding school. Rather, the author wants us to understand that his hands are large, rough, and strong. Capable hands with the power to carry rocks, they touch only delicate "paper bills." Although he has done everything to please his parents, he is unable to please himself and his sense that his hands should accomplish great physical feats. Hands "aching with empty strength" symbolize the heritage that was lost to the boy; he would have been happier maintaining his connection to the land, performing physical labor, and working in a way that allowed him to express himself. Instead, he feels the pain of "throttled rage," anger about the way he has been trapped in life. Warren Pryor would have felt most free stretching his arms and using his powerful hands. To him, freedom might have meant the right to move around outside, to look at nature, to be his own boss. To his parents, freedom meant anything that didn't require these things. They saw a white-collar job as the ultimate freedom, a release from the earth. However, the boy's experience shows us that this kind of work can be more confining. The parents communicate their values to their son through their actions, but the boy never has an outlet to show his parents what's important to him. His rage is, instead, "throttled," doubling his bondage. Not only does he feel trapped by his life, he must trap his own emotions, to keep his parents from understanding the terrible thing they've done to him. Read More