The Furthest Distance I've travelled Flashcards
1
Q
The Value and Difficulty of Relationships
A
- In “The Furthest Distances I’ve Traveled,” the speaker compares the adventurous travels of their younger days to the even more daring distances they’ve traversed “between people.” Though the poem’s speaker has lived an adventurous life, backpacking all over the world, they’ve since discovered that such journeys aren’t the most difficult ones. Relationships, in this poem, are their own kind of journey: an effort to cross the gap between one person and another can be an even greater adventure than a trek across the wilderness.
- Now that the speaker no longer backpacks to faraway places, their life sometimes seems a little bit muted to them. But sometimes, when they’re tidying up their house and throwing things away, they find all sorts of reminders of a different kind of excitement: past relationships. An “alien” pair of underwear, old movie tickets, a “tiny stowaway / pressed flower” and a “throwaway / comment—on a post–it” are as much “souvenirs” as anything the speaker picked up on their travels. Such “crushed valentines,” the speaker implies, bring up memories of lost loves.
- The speaker thus feels that “the furthest distances [they’ve] travelled” aren’t between places, but between people. They may not be trekking “between Krakow / and Zagreb” or taking anti-malarial drugs these days, but their relationships have provided similar thrills and challenges. While the “anony / mity” of travel excited them in their youth, it is the attempt to know and be known that makes their life now challenging and rewarding. A successful relationship, the poem hints, is even harder to navigate than a “sherpa pass”!
2
Q
Seeking adventures vs Settling down
A
- In “The Furthest Distances I’ve Traveled,” the speaker recalls the intense excitement they experienced the first time they picked up a backpack and began traveling the world. They remember the thrill of getting from place to place, whether it was a direct “path” or a more obscure one; adventure, they say, felt like their “destiny.” But nowadays, the speaker admits, they are more likely to be catching up on household chores than jumping on a bus. Though they have left the more active adventures of their youth behind, growing up and settling down has allowed them to appreciate the quieter adventures of everyday life and relationships.
- Still, growing up and settling down doesn’t mean the speaker has lost their sense of adventure. The speaker reflects on the “souvenirs” they find while tidying up: “cinema stubs” and a “pressed flower amid bottom drawers” remind them of “crushed valentines,” words that suggest the speaker has had a busy romantic life. These little mementos of relationships suggest that a rooted life can offer its own thrills. Even if one doesn’t go on wild travels, relationships continue to make life exciting. In this way, the poem suggests that one doesn’t have to go to the ends of the earth to have an adventurous life. An ordinary, settled life offers its share of adventure.
3
Q
Like many folk, …
… to live.
A
- As the poem begins, the speaker recalls the first time they shouldered a traveler’s backpack. Their “spine / curved” beneath it, they say, like “a meridian”—an imaginary longitudinal line that passes over the earth’s surface and connects its poles. This simile suggests that, right from the start, the speaker felt this backpack opened up the whole world to them. Their very body mirrored the shape of the globe they’d soon travel.
- In other words, under the weight of their backpack, the speaker immediately felt that they had found their life’s purpose: to travel all over the world. This will be a poem about a call to adventure—and about what happens after that adventure ends.
- The speaker will tell their tale in eight quatrains (four-line stanzas) of free verse. The lack of meter here, alongside a rough rhyme scheme of couplets (often in the loosest slant rhyme—for instance, “spine” and “meridian” share only that /n/ consonance), will make the speaker’s voice feel colloquial and approachable, as if they’re telling the reader a story over a drink.
4
Q
it came clear …
… kind of destiny.
A
- Despite the challenges of a life lived in constant transit, though, the speaker says that “it came clear as over a tannoy” (a loudspeaker or public announcement system) that “restlessness” and “anony / mity” were a “kind of destiny.” This simile evokes the crackle of an airport loudspeaker in one of those “scattered airports,” as if a call from an airline desk were the voice of Fate, telling the speaker that they were destined for constant anonymous travel. The strong /c/ alliteration in “came clear” emphasizes the crisp certainty of this realization.
- This striking split in the middle of a word suggests that anonymity was a big and important part of the speaker’s adventures: they never really got to know anyone or be known because they were too busy moving around from place to place. Perhaps the mid-word break also suggests that there’s something a little bit broken about anonymity itself. Though the speaker loved their anonymity, perhaps it also cut them off from important things: people they loved, parts of their identity.
- Splitting “anonymity” into two also keeps the poem’s odd rhyme scheme intact, at least on a visual level. “Tannoy” and “anony” look like they should rhyme, as do “mity” and “destiny.” (Out loud this move is more subtle than it looks—one doesn’t really hear the enjambment of “anonymity,” so the reader ends up hearing something like a slant triple rhyme between “tannoy,” “anonymity,” and “destiny”).
4
Q
On the beaten …
… of scattered airports;
A
- After their big revelation about travel as the right way to live life, the speaker recalls, they set off on all sorts of adventures. Whether “on the beaten track” (that is, in bustling, familiar tourist destinations like Paris or Venice), on a wild “sherpa pass” (a dangerous mountain trail), or between “Krakow” (in Poland) and “Zagreb” (in Croatia), the speaker saw a lot of the world. These lines suggest the speaker wasn’t fussy: all kinds of travel interested them, from the relaxing to the outright dangerous. They wanted to experience as much as possible.
- These /s/ sounds highlight the quiet of these far-flung airports, which are snowy-white and blank (and perhaps as prison-like as a Siberian gulag!). Both the hushed sounds and the startling metaphor of these “Siberian white / cells” suggests that there’s a coldness to spending so much time in airports; travelers can feel very far away from ordinary life.
5
Q
So whether it …
… or a giro;
A
- This allusion to Larium suggests that the speaker stopped feeling quite so fearless about their travels. Perhaps this is just an example of the kind of things they started paying attention to around this time. In other words, it might not be that they stopped traveling because they were scared about Larium in particular, but that they started weighing the costs and difficulties of their life on the road a little differently.
- In other words, the speaker is firmly back home now, somewhere in the UK or Ireland. Running errands at the post office, depositing a little cash or an unemployment check into their bank account, they’re living a much more ordinary, settled life than they once did.
5
Q
and why, if …
… really beyond me.
A
- The speaker’s life, it turns out, has changed an awful lot. These days, if they’re “stuffing smalls / hastily into a holdall” (that is, cramming underwear into a bag), it’s “less likely” that they’re “catching a greyhound from Madison to Milwaukee” and more likely that they’re “doing some overdue laundry.” These lines evoke not just the speaker’s current harried, humdrum life, but the excitement of the past, when a younger self used to just jam clothes into a bag and take off.
- In other words, their life has changed pretty dramatically. The carefree, restless days of their youth are over; now they’re living a much more ordinary life. How this came to be “is really beyond [them]”—that is, they’re surprised and kind of confused about how they ended up living this life. Settling down, these lines suggest, can really creep up on a person.
- The speed and momentum of this passage—including an enjambment that leaps right over a stanza break—suggests that the speaker’s life got away from them: they settled down without quite realizing they were doing it. Sometimes, the speaker ruefully reflects, life just happens, and before you know it, you’ve got a fixed address and a long list of chores.
6
Q
However, …
… are my souvenirs
A
- Though their life is practically unrecognizable these days, the speaker implies that their adventures haven’t come to an end. They’ve just changed shape.
- As the speaker is doing one of many “routine evictions” (probably cleaning up their home and throwing out old things, though perhaps they’ve also been literally evicted a few times!), they find all kinds of stray objects that speak to what they’ve been up to since they stopped traveling. Among their finds are “alien pants” (that is, someone else’s underwear), movie tickets, stray notes written “on a post-it,” and a little dried “flower amid bottom drawers.” The speaker says that this random assortment of objects—all of which suggest past relationships—are their “souvenirs” now. In place of globetrotting, they now have the rewards and troubles that come with navigating relationships.
- The pace thus still feels fast, creating the sense that the speaker’s love life, like their travel life, has involved a lot of swift movement from place to place. This suggests that, although the speaker is no longer constantly on the road, they are dealing with the uncertainty and continual change that goes along with getting to know other people.
7
Q
and, from these …
… in their lives.
A
- The speaker compares their keepsakes to “crushed valentines,” suggesting that what all these mementos have in common is that they signify relationships that have ended. The poem thus implies that relationships aren’t exactly easy. Similarly, the image of the “unravelled / sports sock,” another remnant of a past relationship, hints at how easily things can come undone.
- The speaker comes to understand that although they’ve crisscrossed the globe in their physical travels, ultimately “the furthest distances [they’ve] travelled / have been those between people.” In other words, relationships are even more challenging—and thus, the poem implies, potentially more rewarding—than the longest, most arduous treks. The poem’s “distances,” then, are a metaphor for the lengths people go to achieve intimacy. The speaker no longer feels anonymity is their destiny; instead, they long to find connection, to know and be known by others.
8
Q
Form
A
This variety, alongside lots of unexpected enjambments, mirrors the novelty and strangeness of the speaker’s travels, upon which the speaker saw everything from the busy streets of “Krakow / and Zagreb” to a remote “sherpa pass.” The surprises in the poem’s shape also evoke the surprises in the speaker’s life, up to and including the discovery that the “furthest distances” might be between one person and another, not between hemispheres.
9
Q
Meter
A
The poem is written in free verse, so it doesn’t have a regular meter. The lack of meter—along with the use of colloquial vocabulary like “pants” and “holidaying”—means the poem sounds as footloose as the speaker was in their younger days. It also makes the speaker’s voice feel casual and conversational, as if they were just telling an anecdote to a friend.
