Driving Up the Ohio River on Route 2 in Late Fall

Larry Smith, who wrote this poem describes the scenery you can find near a river and during late fall. You can see the different colors of many different things. In the poem, we see the river as a blue/greenish color. We see the "field of alfalfa bordered in brush turn golden brown." We see the the images of empty factories with the color of brick. We see the image of a pick up truck being blue. These images are symbolic because we see light colors that lead to dark colors like the brick found on the empty factories which leads to death or cold colors. To whom, the river is set away from the rest of society.

The main point I found important to this poem was that we could see the images of life and death. In the second to last stanza, "a women carries her baby and grocery bag." This shows that people took care of the people in there life. They nutured and bought the necessities they needed. We also see images of of life and death by the mood of the poem. The mood of the poem is soft and like melancholy. Melancholy is a depressing stage. We see in the poem that it is "Late Fall," as stated in the poem title, and as the poem moves on, that they are looking at the scenery before the winter comes. In the poem, life is the late fall and then death is the winter that is approaching.

As we can see, this poem dealt with a lot of life and death situations. The poem pays much attention to the little details that are within the big picture. This poem was really interesting because it was not a hard poem. It was not like you had to dig for the meaning, but you have to thing outside the box and just think about the picture of walking in the park on the day in fall, but just when it is going to get to winter and lead to death. It taught me to pay attention to just the small things in the big picture and not so much the big picture in general.