Country Lover

Maya Angelou

(1928-2014)

This poem comes straight to the point but still gets you with the last line. I have one son but if I had a daughter, I think this poem would hit even harder.

Country Lover

Funky blues

Keen toed shoes

High water pants

Saddy night dance

Red soda water

And anybody’s daughter.

There’s that one word “saddy,” used for “Saturday.” What does it convey? Does it tell us we are in backwoods country? Perhaps. The young man venturing to the dance is wearing his best clothes but what he has on would probably not impress city folks.

The poem has a strange but engaging pace. The first two lines have just three syllables and they have a jerky quality due to the “k” sound in each line. The rhyme pulls the poem forward, though. The third and fourth lines have four syllables; the fifth has five syllables which slows the poem down ever so slightly to set up the final line of seven syllables.[1]

I have found this poem most effective if each line is read slowly. Actually, you have to recite it deliberately or it will be over before you get started. But that one line “Saddy night dance” seems to move more quickly. Maybe it accelerates because the four syllables are actually five in the mind. The two-syllable “Saddy” being a compression of the three-syllable “Saturday”. Then, the poem slows again, “Red soda water” finishing with what sounds to me an almost menacing last line. Imagine the author with her lush voice and precise delivery, pausing slightly before she lets the audience know that our young man is out for one thing. Maybe I’m being too harsh. Maybe he just wants to dance.

[1]Speaking of arranging words in an ascending order of syllables, I ran across this in Ted Kooser’s introduction to a poem. The bolded words below are not a poem. They are just part of an introduction but check the flow created by the ascending number of syllables for each ‘so …’ "I suspect that one thing some people have against reading poems is that they are

so often so serious, so devoid of joy."

It's a small mattert but a close study of a poet's words will often reveal some nice touches.