At the end of a lovely summer vacation, the speaker in Linda Pastan’s “Leaving the Island” dramatizes the sadness that the vacationers experience as they prepare the vacation home and pack up to leave their summer paradise.
First Tercet: “We roll up the rugs and strip the beds by rote”
The vacationers, likely a family, have come to this island many times, and it has, thus, become a routine that at the end of each summer retreat, they “roll up the rugs and strip the beds”; these two activities represent the entire routine involved in preparing to leave their summer vacation behind.
The speaker then reports that summer is ending as it always does. The family has to board a ferry to travel back to the mainland, but the ride at the end of summer “is no simple pleasure boat.” The ferry itself becomes part of the working world; it is utilitarian rather than purposed for simple fun and leisure, as it, no doubt, would have seemed at the beginning of this holiday.
Second Tercet: “Nor are we simply cargo, though we’ll float”
The family is not “simply cargo,” even though they will float back to the mainland “Alongside heavy trucks – their stink and roar.” The vacationers are precious cargo because they are thinking, feeling human beings.
After mentioning the “stink and roar” of actual cargo, the speaker’s melancholy returns, and she repeats the line that contains the prompt for her melancholy: “We roll up rugs and strip the beds by rote.”
Third Tercet: “This bit of land whose lines the glaciers wrote”
The island on which the vacationers have been enjoying their leisure is but a “bit of land” which was formed by “glaciers.” The speaker picturesquely describes that glacial formation as “lines the glaciers wrote.” Now the speaker will have to be content to “muse” on the “memory” of the island and the pleasurable summer days she has just concluded there.
Then again, as is expected in a well-crafted, traditional villanelle, the speaker’s mind returns to the melancholic prompt; this time she repeats, “The ferry is no simple pleasure boat.”
Fourth Tercet: “I’ll trade my swimsuit for a woolen coat”
Projecting ahead to winter, the speaker reports that instead of the “swimsuit” which she has lived in during the summer, she will be confined to “a woolen coat.” Making it obvious that she is a summer person, she admits that “autumn has but small allure.”
Then the melancholic refrain again intrudes, “We roll up rugs and strip the beds by rote.”
Fifth Tercet: “The absences these empty shells denote”
The melancholy grows with each new stanza and so by the fifth tercet, the speaker is bemoaning the emptiness that “winter has in store.” She sees “absences” in “these empty shells.” She then harkens back to the refrain of the ferry: “The ferry is no simple pleasure boat.”
Final Quatrain: “The songs of summer dwindle to one note”
Summer has been filled with the beautiful music of leisurely, sun-filled, carefree days, but now those “songs of summer dwindle to one note.” And that note is “the fog horn’s blast,” that seems to sound as they shut the door both literally and figuratively on their beautiful summer vacation.
The villanelle concludes with those two haunting lines of refrain: “We rolled up rugs and stripped the beds by rote. / The ferry is no simple pleasure boat.”
Linda Sue Grimes - As a writer, researcher, and SRF devotee, Linda Sue Grimes has studied poetry and practiced Kriya Yoga for over thirty years..
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