Cherrylog Road James Dickey Analysis

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Love and Lust Through the Attentive Eyes of Society As teenagers we desire to act like older adults, but now as adults we reflect on our childhood experiences in an attempt to be young again. There is a fine line between love and lust. Most adults struggle to figure out the differences so it is no surprise that teenagers who are experiencing it for the first time don’t know the difference. Feelings of love, lust, hair growing in strange places and the desire to experience sex dominates the teenage mind. Adolescent sex is forbidden because of the moral values that society place on it. Cherrylog Road, a narrative poem by James L. Dickey has an overall meaning of how society breaks down these and many other social codes because of activities that happen inside automobiles. Dickey utilizes this narrative poem to describe one of these events, the forbidden sexual relationship between a black male, the speaker and a white woman in the south around the 1940’s. Through diction, personification, and imagery…show more content…
This indicates the speaker is the 34 ford and Doris is the Essex. Essex at one time was also used to describe a woman from an upper class section of England that was obsessed with having sex. The fact that Doris has to escape from her father obviously indicates that not only does he not approve of this relationship, it also points out that Doris has done this before. The speaker and Doris have sex in a “long Pierce-Arrow” that still has a partially broken glass panel, which separates the passenger from the driver. In that day the driver would normally be colored, as indicated by the speaker, and the passenger would be a high class white person. The glass panel represents racial separation and how it is partially broken but not fully gone. The partially broken out panel is an indication that the social barrier of racism has only been partially broken

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