So This is Nebraska

The poem’s title reveals one of its primary themes: Nebraska. In other words, what Nebraska means to Kooser, and how he sees and feels about it will be explored. In “So This Is Nebraska,” this is Nebraska for Kooser, and the speaker that guides his poem.

For the first two stanzas, the speaker is rather disembodied. No pronoun marks the presence of a specific, identifiable speaker. It is as if the images of Nebraska subsume the speaker and their identity at first. In the opening stanza, the poem captures the reader and pulls them into the middle of the action as they are riding along a “gravel road” (Line 1) at a “slow gallop” (Line1). For this image, Kooser uses a literary device called juxtaposition, since he pairs the image of a car ride with the slow gallop. The image suggests a return to the past, for while the speaker is in a modern car, their imagination has returned to the days of horseback riding on the open plains. This nostalgic return to another time permeates the poem.

In Lines 2-4, Kooser continues to juxtapose advances in technology with rustic, natural things. In Line 2, he sets the image of telephone lines against the open fields, and in Lines 3-4, he pairs the image of dry, billowing dust being kicked up by the car with the bright red “sparks” (Line 4) of redwing blackbirds.

For Stanza 2, Kooser introduces a new literary device: personification. The “loosening barns” (Line 6) the speaker notes are the “dear old ladies” (Line 5) mentioned in the previous line. Thus, the speaker likens atrophied barns to aging women, and the windows of the barns suddenly become eyes, which is why they’re “dulled by cataracts of hay” (Line 7). Like some older people, the aging barn appears to have blurred vision because the lenses on their eyes—their windows—are clouding. Inside these barns, or “under their skirts” (Line 8), tractors are hidden, bringing to mind the image of an old woman of another era wearing a large hoop skirt.

After setting the scene with a whimsical picture of the landscape, the speaker turns their attention to the listener with a change in diction. No longer focused on presenting extended images, the speaker declares, matter-of-factly, “So this is Nebraska.” Yes, the juxtaposed, personified images in the first two stanzas—that is Nebraska. The frank diction and tone continue when the speaker says, “A Sunday afternoon; July” (Lines 9-10). The speaker shifts the tone from a fanciful musing on the countryside to a short and direct observation, keeping the diction and tone clipped.

Here, the speaker reveals that they are “Driving along / with your hand out squeezing the air” (Line 10-11). As Line 11 indicated, the speaker is in a car, and their hand is out the window to squeeze the air. With this shift, Kooser sidesteps using the first-person possessive pronoun, creating some distance between the speaker and the subject. The speaker does not say, “My hand out squeezing air.” Instead, they use the second-person singular pronoun you, giving the impression the speaker is addressing someone else, and possibly themselves. This distance between speaker and self creates a tension in the poem—one where the speaker is deeply immersed in the experience of Nebraska, but simultaneously maintaining a distance from that enjoyment.

The speaker returns to personification when they say a “meadowlark waiting on every post” (Line 12). This makes the meadowlark seem like a person or a sentinel who is eagerly awaiting to see them as they drive by. After ascribing human traits to the songbird, the speaker extends this personification to a “pickup” (Line 15). Behind a line of cedar trees, plants, bees, and pollen, a pickup truck “kicks its fenders off” (Line 15) as if it is taking off its shoes after a long day at work. The truck seems to relax into nature—it “settles back to read the clouds” (Line 16). Similar to what a person might do, the truck examines and contemplates the clouds.

The speaker can relate to this imagined pickup and makes their playful envy known with more direct diction: “You feel like that,” admits the speaker (Line 17). The speaker spends the rest of Stanza 5 explaining what they mean. They feel like letting their “tires go flat” (Line 18), allowing mice to “build a nest” (Line 19) in their muffler, and being nothing more “than a truck in the weeds” (Line 20). The speaker wants to surrender, to be like the broken-down truck and abandon any purpose or ambition they might have, and let nature take its course.

In Stanza 6, the speaker lists other peculiar activities they would like to do. They would not mind “clucking with chickens” (Line 21) or being “sticky with honey” (Line 21). These images indicate a disregard for societal norms and a return to animal behavior. It is as if the speaker wishes he, too, could depart from standards that tend to look askew at people who make animal sounds or have food on them. The first two images in Stanza 6 imply the speaker wants to let go and feel free to act as weird and unconventional as he wants—to be free of human civilization.

Returning to the image of the pickup truck the speaker feels like “holding a skinny old man” in his lap (Line 22), calling to mind a tender but quintessential image of life in the countryside. This older man “watches the road, waiting for someone to wave to” (Lines 23-24). With this image, the Kooser introduces the theme of interconnectedness or the need for simple human interaction in a landscape of nature and abandoned traces of humanity.

The speaker seems to want to reach out to other humans. They “feel like // waving” (Lines 24-25), but they also feel like “stopping the car / and dancing around on the road” (Lines 25-26). In the last three stanzas of the poem, the speaker lists several things they wish they could be or feel like doing. The longing tone suggests the speaker is repressing some overwhelming natural instinct brought on by this location. Rather than indulge in these feelings, the speaker tells the reader that “You wave” (Line 26), making that connection to the old man.  Out of all of the actions the speaker could have done, waving is the most restrained, and allows them to maintain some distance from the alluring country around them. And yet, the poem finishes with the words “gliding” (Line 27) and “larklike” (Line 28), implying that this gesture has had a somewhat freeing influence on the slightly cynical speaker.