Inviting a Journey of Sensitivity.

Hettie Jones's "Hard drive"

Short Assignment (Paper)

John Ossa
ID. 917347593

Tel Aviv University

The Lester and Sally Entin Faculty of Humanities

Department of English and American Studies

Poetry Analysis

Dr. Zoe Beenstock

November 20, 2013

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Inviting a Journey of Sensitivity. Hettie Jones's "Hard Drive"

A memory of views and emotions intends to provide with voice some features of the female

world, functioning in society. Hettie Jones's poem "Hard Drive" appears to be a sample of a

woman's statement, speaking to herself through this memory, but implicitly speaking also to

other two different listeners who, at the same time, converge in a metaphorical driving: the

journey –more than geographical, psychological- inside one's self, in order to raise a

significant voice of sensitivity, capable of awakening aware attitudes and conscious feelings.

The first of those two listeners appears to be the urban society –pictured as much in

the first and third stanzas-, in which the poem looks to be developed. The scenery is mostly

framed with the reference to the rush of the city and to a kind of wild performance of drivers

along the road, as pointed in line 3: "dancing in plastic along the bridge rail", and also in line

13: "above the road like animals"; both statements somehow reflect a sense of alienation and

loss of senses. A second listener could be the world of male development therein contained,

which serves as a mirror for contrasting the female positioning in that society. Images as "the

stuffed bears were up again" (1) or "animals proud of their pink underbellies" (13-14) might

reflect male characteristics, considering those actors to be rough, -certainly influenced by that

urban atmosphere of rushes and indifference- that put sensitivity at stake, but also who seek

for immediate pleasure and satisfaction. But who perhaps is the more important listener is the

speaker herself, who finds her own functioning and her expression, immersed within the

coordinates of that urban unfolding mostly managed by male figures with their structures. The

female self of the speaker is always present, at first as a third person narrator describing the

surrounding situation, but later on as a first person speaker, remarked with the use of active

verbs: "I saw" (16), "I cried" (18), "I have always been" (24), and even highlighted at a major

grade in the second stanza, where it comes to be a sort of insight, as an inner voice trying to

be expressed out to the audience: "for one used to pleasure in small doses" (8-9); when even if
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implicit, the reader can capture the voice of the speaker, unraveling inner thoughts connected

to emotions and sensitivity.

With a contrast of images regarding the subject of light and darkness, the poet helps

this understanding: "under a sky half misty, half blue" (4), "but then later, at sunset…/…in a

high wind, with clouds big and drifting/" (10;12). These atmospheric phenomena are rather

metaphors of emotional states, which this sensitive woman is capable to perceive and

associate with her own emotions. Even though the picture is about concern and

dissatisfaction, the moment is illuminated by a possibility of light, becoming an also

possibility of overcoming: "white clouds blowing in from the west" (5-6) and "In a moment of

intense light/ I saw an Edward Hopper house,/ at once so exquisitely light and dark" [my

stresses in bold letters] (15-17). The use of the adverb exquisitely is a delicate and female-like

expression of a state of acceptance and moving forward (light), contrasting a more

materialistic and pragmatic world (darkness). This way, the whole of the female identity can

be displayed by letting herself perform what she needs to: "I cried, all the way up Route 22/

those uncontrollable tears/ 'as though the body were crying'" (18/20). Crying certainly

becomes act of liberation, of allowing her female self to show emotions (light), right in a

world that pretends more to contain feelings than to express them (darkness), because that

would connote weakness and incapability (often conferred to women).

The poem gets –in this journey- to a sort of self-empowering statements, expressed in

lines 22 and 23, which appear deliberately separated as a second different insight: "here's the

dilemma" (22), "itself the solution" (23). These final statements are individuated as loud and

clear voices, enabling a whole new perception: sensitivity and managing capability, emotions

and a more practical self-driving of life, are not contradictory. The female speaker wanted to

rather move into a more profound sphere, demonstrating how sensitivity, matching the whole

of human dimensions –male and female, bodily and emotional-, goes beyond the superficial

in order to shake that world of spiraling insensitive routines.