Refrain

"The Long Voyage"

By: Malcolm Cowley

(poem from poetryfoundation.org)

Not that the pines were darker there,   

nor mid-May dogwood brighter there,   

nor swifts more swift in summer air;

    it was my own country,

having its thunderclap of spring,   

its long midsummer ripening,   

its corn hoar-stiff at harvesting,

    almost like any country,

yet being mine; its face, its speech,   

its hills bent low within my reach,   

its river birch and upland beech

    were mine, of my own country.

Now the dark waters at the bow

fold back, like earth against the plow;   

foam brightens like the dogwood now

    at home, in my own country.

Biographical Information

             In 1934 Malcolm Cowley published an autobiographical literary history, Exile's Return: A Narrative of Ideas, and established himself as an important writer. Three decades later in 1965 the editor of Literary Times would write, "Malcolm Cowley is, next to Edmund Wilson, the finest literary historian and critic . . . in America today." 

             Cowley is also recognized as one of the major literary historians of the twentieth century, and his Exile's Return, if not the definitive chronicle of the 1920s, is certainly one of the most widely read. At the time the book was first published in 1934, J. D. Adams of the New York Times noted: "As the sincere attempt of a writer of our time to explain himself and his generation, to trace the flux of ideas and other influences to which he was subjected during his formative years, Mr. Cowley's book is a valuable document. It should interest the literary historian of the future no less than it must interest Mr. Cowley's contemporaries, however hard some of them may find it to grant him all his premises and to agree with all his deductions from them." Another literary history for which Cowley received considerable praise was A Second Flowering: Works and Days of the Lost Generation, which deals with the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, e. e. cummings, Thornton Wilder, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, and Hart Crane.

              Regarding his own career, Cowley explained to Southern Review interviewer Diane U. Eisenberg: "I didn't drive myself to write some big work that was really expected of me. I had chances, too, but I didn't drive myself to finish it. And the fact that I didn't drive myself hard enough in my twenties is the big error I made. I should have been looking much more at the big overall pattern . . . keeping at producing bigger books." The majority of Cowley's books were published after his seventieth birthday. He retired from writing in 1983, and from then on remained on the sidelines of literary study. His papers are housed at the Newberry Library, Chicago, and at Yale University.

(biographical information from poetryfoundation.org)

Explanation of  Technique

              In refrain poems, lines or phrases are repeated at certain periods within a poem. Usually, the lines or phrases are repeated at the end of a stanza. Throughout a refrain poem the intensity and tone of it can build, because of the repeated phrases or lines. The refrain featured in, "The Long Voyage", is country.

Interpretation of Poem

            This poem by Malcolm Cowley, describes a man voyaging back to his home country.  The man in the poem tells the reader about his strong desire of getting back to his home country and gives words to illustrate it. The message this poem is trying to get across to the reader is, there is nothing like home. Being home can provide comfort and love, especially if you have loved ones in your home country.

(picture from tripadvisor.com)

Visual Explanation

          The picture above is of a boat getting ready to arrive upon shore and dock. I think this picture illustrates the poem good, because the man in the poem too is arriving upon shore and be back in his home country. The poem tells the reader how wonderful and comforting home can be.