Otherwise by Jane Kenyon

I choose to write about the poem Otherwise by Jane Kenyon. This poem really spoke to me after the first read through and touched on something that I think about a lot. In literal thoughts, this poem is simply about a person that is living the life that they love. Except the person leaving this life knows that everyday will not always be as great as the day he/she is living today. The author describes this person’s life in nearly every aspect from the morning he/she wakes up until the moment he/she goes to sleep. This poem reminded me of a ‘to-do list’ because everything the author stated went in order of when he/she did it and it was easy to follow along.
One of the aspects of this poem that I had trouble figuring out was whether or not the subject in this poem is a male or a female. There were many different lines that could have thrown the reader off by trying to differentiate between what gender the subject really was. For example, “I got out of bed on two strong legs”. The majority of women in this world would not describe their legs as strong, because most women want slim looking legs. This was the first reason why I assumed the subject was a male. The line “I ate cereal, sweet milk, ripe, flawless peach”. This statement makes me change my opinion to the subject being a female. I believe that a man with ‘strong legs’ would eat more than just cereal. This meal sounds very feminine and as if a healthy woman would eat. My opinion changes again with the line, “At noon I lay down with my mate”. Because of stereotypes, I assume that only a man would call a woman a ‘mate’. Women tend to give men cute names such as ‘pumpkin’, ‘boo’, ‘baby’, etc. After reading this poem through its entirety, I have come to the conclusion that the subject is a woman, because throughout her day she never went to work or did any true work. This makes me assume that she is a stay at home wife that takes care of the house and her husband.
A unique aspect of this poem is its structure and sentence format. This poem consists of two stanzas. The stanzas are split based off of the time of the day; the first stanza starts from morning to noon and the second stanza is from noon to night time. The stanzas could have also been separated by the number of subjects that were introduced to the reader. In the first stanza it was all first person and simply about what the woman was doing in the morning time. Once the second stanza began the author introduced a lover, or in this case, a ‘mate’. To me, this sort of changed my feelings toward the poem. It was as if it went from a woman waking up to a great day by herself, to her having a great day with the person that she loves. One of the best feelings in the world is to not only be happy, but having somebody to enjoy your happiness with together.
From that idea, it made me realize that there was more to this poem than just happy feelings and having the perfect day. It made it seem as though she knew that happiness is not forever so she is really enjoying her time with her ‘mate’ and is not taking it for granted. People tend to take those happy moments for granted, and may wake up the next day and there may not be another chance for that happy moment. That is why the author repeats the line, “It might have been otherwise”. This one line is repeated five times throughout the poem to show that there is great emphasis on this line and that the author wants the reader to truly understand the deeper meaning behind this poem. Some days we have good days, and some days we have bad days. We tend to always be stuck on those bad days that we are not grateful and do not take full advantage of our good days. This poem is telling the reader that when your day is going ‘perfect’ that you should be happy for it, because happiness and ‘perfect’ days do not come every day.