summary of come out with
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Answer:
Line 1
The title of this poem immediately programs our expectations as to its processes and positions the reader as a follower. We expect to be led somewhere, to be given secret knowledge. The narrator implores the reader to follow him, positioning himself as a guide of sorts—like Virgil is in Dante’s Inferno—to the uninitiated. We are intrigued because he wants us to come with him “into those things” rather than into a place, and we want to know what he means by this statement. “This despair” is also cryptic, but we infer that the speaker has somehow experienced it as well, or else he would not urge us to follow and trust him.
Lines 2-4
“One of those things” is named. The speaker wants us to enter the world of discarded car wheels. He compares these wheels to drunken naked men who “howl with a terrible loneliness.” This makes sense if you have ever heard the noise of wind whistling through a freestanding tire. But these tires/men are also suicidal, or at least prone to accidents, as they “stagger” to their death. The words “at last” underscore the sheer exhaustion of these things, the hopelessness they feel about their existence. By personifying the tires, Bly is stating that some men lament their existence and are like the discarded wheels of Chevrolets. Their writhing about on the ground, drunk and naked, suggests a kind of bacchanalian ritual—yet this ritual seems more akin to a last meal, with their drunkenness being a confession of their pain and suffering. We can see the emergence of Bly’s ultimate philosophy in these lines, as his focus on the deterioration of the inner man foreshadows his assertions that late-twentieth-century males have lost touch with what it means to be a man.
Lines 5-7
The speaker continues his description of the tires and the implicit comparison to the men named earlier. The inner tubes of the tires suggest the inner lives of the men, which have been battered by their travel through life. That the tubes “tried and burst” makes them tragic. Like the tires, these men have been “abandoned” even though they made effort. The images Bly uses to evoke the emptiness and feeling of waste that human beings sometimes feel is appropriate if we think of these things as commodities—as human-made objects that are bought and sold. Increasingly, Western societies have made the dollar the criteria for human value. No longer are we valued for our ability to create and develop communities based on mutual interest, but, rather, we are judged by our capacity to compete and win in the marketplace. Human beings have become just one more item in that marketplace, Bly seems to suggest. And what better commodity to compare our inner lives to than the automobile, the symbol of mobility, prosperity, and progress in twentieth-century America? The automobile is also a central image of maleness. Men have long been characterized as being obsessed with machines, and in America, getting one’s driver’s license, especially for males, marks an initiation of sorts—an entry into adulthood.
Lines 8-11
This last image appears out of place. Bly seems to have given up on the worn tire as symbol of human desperation and now uses “curly steel shavings” to evoke the once vital inner lives of the men.