Nobody in "Travel" announces a change of heart. The speaker begins by admitting reluctance ("I didn't much want to go") and ends in a canoe, gliding back on the tide, without ever saying that the fear has gone. The poem simply lets attention replace it. Its central idea is that the unknown is frightening mainly while it stays imagined, and that close looking can turn dread into something nearer to belonging.
The opening section is plain and a little hesitant. The line breaks make the speaker's mind look like it is running ahead of her: "what to expect, / imagining" hangs at the end of a stanza, and the next one fills with invented dangers, "alligator attack, / drowning in deep water". The odd phrase is "some vicious consciousness". It is vaguer than the alligator and more unsettling, a menace with no body. Notice that none of these things ever turns up later. The journey itself is told in sound and motion: "whistles in my sleep" and a "tug away from every thing I knew." Writing "every thing" as two words makes the left-behind world feel like a heap of separate objects, each one pulling loose.
Then comes the capitalised heading, TEN THOUSAND ISLANDS, and the poem changes in texture. The first-person "I" disappears. The sentences turn into fragments and lists, as if the speaker has stopped narrating and started noticing. Real details crowd in: mangrove roots "red and tangled," bromeliads, mosses, mosquitoes, the gumbo limbo and mahogany trees. Some of the images are quietly strange. The roots are "dripping mandrake-shapes," which suggests the folklore of mandrake roots that look like little people, and the seedlings are "wading" and "gathering shells" as though they were people too. The sand crabs have "mysterious digs / and arguments," which is funny and affectionate. The threatening unknown has become a neighbourhood with its own quarrels. "The strangeness of these fish" sums up the shift. Strangeness is still there, but it now invites curiosity where before it prompted panic.
The poem has no rhyme and no fixed meter. Its music comes from repetition, especially of *shell* and *drip*. Shells appear in the shallows, on the roots, in the sand underfoot, and in the "shell-sand grinding the canoe." By the end the canoe's passage is "hours of slow shell-grinding," and the drips are everywhere, from the oar, the leaf and the root. The heavy compound phrases ("Thick water silence," "green-gray shell-made clay") put several stressed syllables together and slow the reading down, which suits a slow boat in still water. The repetition also works like the tide itself, returning and returning.
The tide gives the poem its frame. It opens with "easy out toward the islands" and closes with "Then easy in, / the shallow tide slip gray-green." Even the colour phrase turns round: "green-gray" in the middle becomes "gray-green" at the close, so the words make the same out-and-back trip as the canoe. The final word, "slip," is smooth and almost silent, the opposite of the "tug" that pulled the speaker from home.
The poem also lets another human presence into the landscape. The trees stand "along / Calusa paths," and the islands are ones "the mangroves made, / Calusa made." The Calusa were the Indigenous people of southwest Florida, and the repeated "made" suggests that these islands, built up from shell, are the work of people as well as plants. That changes the setting. It is not empty wilderness waiting to swallow a visitor, but a place long lived in and shaped. Judging by the poem's language, the speaker's early image of "so far away from home" gives way to a sense of being one more traveller on old routes.
The poem is worth reading for how little it insists. It does not lecture about courage or the value of travel. It shows a mind quietly trading imagined alligators for real crabs, and the vague fear of "some vicious consciousness" for the plain sounds of dripping water. The lesson is in what the speaker chooses to notice.