The poem positions memory not as a static archive, but as a fluid, unpredictable terrain. The grandmother's mind is forced to travel back and forth through time, proving that the final "journey" of human life is often inward. 2. Resilience vs. Fragility
The poem highlights the weight of a long life lived through a chaotic, "tangled" history. The "mangled" past implies that memory is a traumatic, uneven landscape. from journeys poem analysis keith tan
The most immediate and powerful element of "Journeys" is its raw, often grotesque visual language. Tan rejects the aesthetic of romantic travel. There are no majestic landscapes or moments of sublime peace. Instead, the world is rendered through a lens of butchery and decay. The speaker sees markets selling "Flesh / Of goats, cows, pigs, hens or roosters, ducks and women". This juxtaposition is the poem’s first major shock. By placing women in a list directly after animals, in the same grammatical position, Tan enacts a horrifying metaphor: in the economy of this world, women’s bodies are no different than animal carcasses. They are a commodity to be "traded for money". The poem positions memory not as a static
The poem typically utilizes free verse . This lack of a rigid rhyme scheme or predictable meter mirrors the unpredictable, fluid nature of a long journey and the stream-of-consciousness nature of the speaker's thoughts. Resilience vs
: The "proud maps that spoke only to themselves" suggest a world (likely colonial) that was self-important and perhaps disconnected from the reality of the people living within its borders. GCE O Level Unseen Poems (2014 - 2023) | PDF - Scribd