Hi, need to submit a 750 words essay on the topic The Race by Sharon Olds.Download file "The Race by Sharon Olds" to see previous pages... The poem in the end suggests that indeed she was united with

Hi, need to submit a 750 words essay on the topic The Race by Sharon Olds.

The poem in the end suggests that indeed she was united with her father but in a different level this time. The end seems to suggest that in search for a solution, the persona has lost recklessly her life in order to bridge the gap between her father and her which she had wanted to attain through a mere plane flight.

The lines are suggestive -

"Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically."

"Torpor" is defined as by The American Heritage Dictionary as a state of mental or physical inactivity or insensibility. Things happen in life and we take to them automatically without much thinking. We take to things like eating and sleeping like they happened everyday in the same old way. It is only when things jar us into an end that we take notice of these everyday happenings in life. We tend to think we are going to live everyday that we will never miss anything or anyone in the structure of our lives at anytime, that things will happen exactly according to schedules like the sun rising without fail in the morning, and setting without fail in the evening. The beginning of the poem presented the persona's dilemma that disrupted her life and she came face to face with reality.

It is obvious that she thought the plane would be there as scheduled. When she looked for another alternative, more or less, she had expected the alternative to be readily there. When there was none, at least she thought the second alternative was also there as a ready replacement. The self-admission is contained in here -

I ran, I who have no sense of direction

raced exactly where he'd told me, like a fish

slipping upstream deftly against the

flow of the river. I jumped off that bus with my

heavy bags and ran, the bags

wagged me from side to side as if to

prove I was under the claims of material.

Man tends to think that matters automatically arrange themselves for human beings. When it does not, then man begins to notice and question why. Instead of facing up to reality, man tends to solve things and abandon life entirely in pursuit of what is immediately before him. The persona, for example, did not care anymore about herself in pursuit of a flight bringing herself to her father as in -

I raced up the moving stairs

two at a time, at the top I saw the

long hollow corridor and

then I took a deep breath, I said

goodbye to my body, goodbye to comfort, I

used my legs and heart as if I would

gladly use them up for this, to

touch him again in this life.