Traveler — Summary

Dave BontaContemplative

who ever had less than the same innocence as the wise?

she keeps house where the day rooms out in the bare-legged corn

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The poem opens with a puzzling question: who ever had less than the same innocence as the wise? The phrasing is twisted, but the idea seems to be that wise people are no less innocent than anyone else. Wisdom doesn't cancel out a kind of basic unknowing, and maybe the wise are simply innocents who have learned to see it.

The second part shifts to a quiet image. A woman keeps house, and the day "rooms" out in the bare-legged corn. Turning "room" into a verb makes daylight feel like a space she lives in, spread across the field. The corn is "bare-legged," as if it were a person, its stalks stripped and exposed.

The speaker doesn't say much about their own feelings, but the tone is curious and gentle. The title suggests someone passing through, watching this woman's domestic world from outside. The mood is calm, slightly mysterious, and rooted in the countryside, leaving the connection between the two parts for the reader to work out.

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