A Study Guide for William Stafford's "Fifteen"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for William Stafford's "Fifteen," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Aug 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535823319

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5

Fifteen

William Stafford

1966

Introduction

Fifteen is part of the fourth book of Stafford’s poems, The Rescued Year, published in 1966. Many of the poems in the collection are dramas of the human past which attempt to recapture an event or to confront its having vanished, and which offer enhancement through the memory of the event’s original occurrence combined with the revisit. These poems, like most of Stafford’s, are set in the landscape of the American West, and particularly the Northwest. Fifteen is generally considered one of the finest poems in the collection, and typifies Stafford’s sparse and simple narrative style, his friendly and conversational tone, his theme of self-reconciliation and regeneration through self-questioning and the process of discovery.

The poem is also an example of Stafford’s tendency to use small images and gestures to make the reader see larger, important issues and insights. It also typifies Stafford’s use of the open country of the Northwest as the arena for his persona’s discoveries and explorations. Fifteen contains a tension found in many of Stafford’s poems, between the natural world and the artificial, mechanized world man has created; and also contains subcategories of these: the intuitive and the rational. In Fifteen, Stafford juxtaposes a man-made motorcycle on its side still ticking in the natural high grass, its owner thrown off and lying bloody in the same grass. The persona of the poem then battles between a feeling of impulsive and imaginative flight on the cycle, and the rational response to help the rider and return him to his uprighted bike. Looking back, the narrator wonders that he had discovered not only the event, but his mixed feelings, thoughts and choice at the young age of