Imagery, Rhythm and Emotion in “Home to Roost”, Book Review Example

The first lines of Kay Ryan’s poem “Home to Roost” establish an immediate sense of the surreal:

The chickens are blotting out the day/the sun is bright, but the chickens are in the way

It is apparent that what the author is describing is not something that is happening literally; as Ryan herself explains, she is aware that chickens do not, in fact, fly. Although the setting of the poem is clearly figurative, the imagery Ryan evokes with her description of the birds “blotting out the day,” makes it all but impossible to avoid picturing what such a scene would look like. Ryan couples this imagery with a sense of pacing and rhythm that that moves the reader forward in time; she is not painting a still image so much as she is filming a scene. This combination of imagery and motion allows readers to step inside the poem, to see and feel what Ryan is feeling.

As I read “Home to Roost” and considered how best to frame a discussion about my response to Ryan’s work, I began by reading about the author herself. A recording of Ryan reciting “Home to Roost” at a 2006 poetry festival further reveals the rhythmic structure of the poem; the way it reads on the page is echoed in the way Ryan reads it aloud, but the tenor of her voice softens some of the potentially frantic edges of the pandemonium she describes. Although the image of chickens blotting out the sun would seem to naturally include a significant amount of chaos as wings and beaks and talons were flapping and pecking and scratching, the deliberate pacing of the poem’s rhythmic structure subverts such a notion. Instead, these imaginary and metaphorical chickens are moving as one, much like a flock of actual flighted birds would do. After all, if chickens are going to fly, they may as well get it right.

Ryan cheekily acknowledges the almost silly nature of the idea of flying chickens when, in the third line –after asserting that the chickens are “in the way” of the sun- by affirming it a third time: “Yes,” she writes, “the sky is dark with chickens, dense with them.” The pacing of the poem’s rhythm that evoked a sense of flocking birds is picked up at this point by the words themselves: “They turn and then they turn again.” The first half of “Home to Roost” deftly draws readers into the scene by quickly establishing a powerful visual image filled with motion and momentum.

When Ryan describes the thought process she used in writing “Home to Roost,” she makes it clear that it is a very personal poem. The phrase “chickens coming home to roost” already implies some sort of reckoning for earlier sins, and Ryan admits to many mistakes of her own. At the same time, however, Ryan does not offer readers any details about what former transgressions she may have committed; the point is not about what she may have done but about how she feels about it now. This is the real emotional core of the poem: Ryan’s chickens are coming home to roost, and there are so many of them that they darken the sky. The movement and imagery of the poem allows readers to empathize with Ryan, and to imagine our own chickens coming home to roost.

If the first half of “Home to Roost” draws readers into the scene, the second half of the poem fulfills the promise of the opening lines:

These are the chickens you let loose one at a time and small –various breeds

The mistakes Ryan made when she was younger were made “one at a time and small.” She purposefully writes “you let loose” rather than “I let loose,” further emphasizing the way the poem is personally structured to draw in the reader. The final line brings the full impact of the poem to bear:

Now they have come home to roost –all the same kind at the same speed

The mistakes, bad decisions, and wrongdoings we all commit over the course of a lifetime are often “small” and of “various breeds.” The cumulative effect of making such small mistakes can have significant consequences later, a point Ryan makes very clearly and empathically as she describes the returning, roosting chickens as being “all the same kind” and moving at “all the same speed.” Whatever the consequences were for Ryan as her chickens came home to roost, they had clearly grown out of a countless number of small choices that may have seemed inconsequential at the time. Through the effective use of rhythm, imagery, and emotion, Ryan has created a poem that is both personal to her and at the same time has a universal emotional resonance for anyone and everyone who reads it.

References

Ryan, K. (2006). Home to Roost- Audio Clip. Retrieved November 21, 2013, from http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20197

Ryan, K. (2006). Video: Kay Ryan: The Poet’s View. Retrieved November 21, 2013, from http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20269