19 pages • 38-minute read
So This is Nebraska
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Themes
Isolation, Alienation, and Connection
The themes of isolation, alienation, and connection tie together to create the wistful, longing feeling that permeates the poem. In many moments, the speaker appears alienated—from themselves and their surroundings. The self alienation is such that the speaker does not refer to themselves until Line 11, and, when they do, they use the second-person pronoun “you.” This “you” is ambiguous enough to allow the reader to wonder if the speaker is talking to the reader, to someone else in the car, or to themselves. However, the emphasis on personal feelings in Stanzas 5-7 makes it logical to conclude that the speaker is talking about themselves.
The speaker’s feelings reveal their isolation. They are in a car “driving along” (Line 10), at a distance from their surroundings. While they can witness the scenery, their mobility prevents them from becoming a permanent or stable part of the countryside. Thus, the speaker is isolated from their environment, and a growing longing betrays a desire to enter into that landscape of decrepit barns, abandoned trucks, busy chickens and beehives. The speaker says, “you feel like that” (Line 17), like deflating like a flat tire and sinking into that lazy, abandoned landscape. However, by contrast the speaker’s car continues down the road, anything but broken down, carrying them away from that isolation from peaceful and natural existence.
The alienation and isolation yield to a longing for connectedness. The speaker wants to build a meaningful relationship with their environment. They long to mimic their surroundings or celebrate them by “dancing around on the road” (Line 26). The speaker ends up expressing their connection with a wave that leaves them feeling “larklike” (Line 28). This freedom further complicates the speaker’s chances of connection since the things in their vicinity are not free or mobile; the truck and the barns are fixed points in the landscape, and the “skinny old man” (Line 22) similarly gives the impression of immobility. Then again, merely by driving through, “squeezing the air” (Line 11), and, of course, waving, perhaps the speaker acquires a deeper bond with the Nebraskan environment, and the moment is enough for them.
Freedom From Work and Conventions
The theme of work is prominent in the poem. The speaker focuses on things that do not work or have fallen into disuse. What catches the speaker’s eye and makes them envious is disrepair and obsoletion. In Stanzas 4-5, the speaker contemplates the rundown pickup that’s “no more than a truck in the weeds” (Line 20). The speaker says, “You feel like that” (Line 17), with the “that” being unoccupied and inert. The truck does not work anymore, and the speaker also feels like casting aside responsibility for the calm of a sort of retirement. For the speaker, such a purposeless condition has an upside—it brings rest, relaxation, and the time to do things that lack a clear objective or monetary gain, like simply “read the clouds” (Line 16).
The series of unconventional images further the theme of freedom. Not only does the speaker feel like the pickup truck, but also like “clucking with chickens or sticky with honey / or holding a skinny old man” (Lines 21-22) in their lap. Each of these things defy conventional norms. They are what one can do if they do not have obligations or a job to perform. A person who spends their days “clucking with chickens or sticky with honey” lives quite a different life than a career-focused city dweller. Additionally, the “skinny old man” is not expected to have a job or conform to conventions due to his age and his position. The old man is free to sit in the pickup truck’s “lap” (Line 22) like a child, waving at passers by.
The final image of “your hand out gliding / larklike over the wheat, over the houses” (Lines 27-28) indicates that the speaker has acquired some modicum of freedom, as “gliding” describes a graceful movement, and birds often symbolize a type of liberty. Then again, maybe the speaker is “over the wheat, over the houses” because they are departing from this free environment and returning to their restrained world. In other words, they are waving goodbye. If the speaker had managed to obtain liberty from work and societal norms, they probably would have done something more liberating like “stopping the car” (Line 25) to dance on the road.
Accepting Different Changes in Life
Another way to tackle Kooser's poem is through the theme of acceptance and making peace with changes in the world. In the first stanza, the speaker accepts the merger of the organic world with technology. The speaker does not bemoan the telephone, nor do they glorify “the fields” (Line 2). Instead, the speaker accepts the developments and figures out a way to bring them together by tying dust to electric sparks and blackbirds. The shifting sights intoxicate and take over the speaker to such an extent that they do not bother to mark their identity until midway through Stanza 3.
In Stanzas 2, 4, and 5, the speaker observes the changes that time has made on the barns and the pickup truck. As with the telephone wires in Stanza 1, the speaker takes a neutral stance, about why the barns or the pickup truck might be in the state they are in; what captures the speaker’s attention is the image of them as they are—relics of another time that is slipping away into nature.
Then again, the sight of these transformed things supplies the speaker with specific feelings. It makes them jubilant and desiring. It is like they wish they could change with the landscape and devolve as well. The changes presented in the poem are not necessarily positive, but they do not seem to bring the speaker down—quite the opposite. The speaker celebrates and accepts these changes because they are a part of life, and, in the context created by the speaker, there is not much the speaker can do. People and things—dear old ladies, old men, and tractors—break down, and seeing such a fundamental part of life does not revolt the speaker but intrigues them.
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