Autumn Begins in Martin\'s Ferry Ohio

James Wright comments on life in an American steel town with his poem "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio." Using free verse, Wright is nonetheless able to imbue the poem with flowing cadence. The poet offers his readers a glimpse into a small segment of Americana, while at the same time delivering universal human truths. Only three stanzas long, "Autumn Begins" is an observation of the crowd and activity at a high school football game. In the first stanza, the narrator muses about the various minority groups in Martins Ferry. The second stanza is devoted to the state of affairs of American family life and the state of mind of the wives at home. Finally, the third stanza depicts the young athletes, who play an aggressive sport that mimics their father's hard work. "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio" combines modern poetic devices and a somber tone to convey life in Middle America.

Free verse, used by many modern poets, allows much leeway and freedom for both writer and reader. Wright manages to maintain rhythm within his poem without sacrificing this freedom. With no fixed meter or set number of metric feet per verse, "Autumn Begins" sounds surprisingly rhythmic. The poet also uses no perceptible rhyme scheme in "Autumn Begins," but the diction still flows musically. However, Wright does employ a few internal rhymes, such as "gray faces," and "Wheeling Steel." The poet uses a unique type of sound device by placing similar-sounding consonants together within a line. For example, "ruptured night watchmen" contains subtle but similar sounds, notably the "ch" sound. Other poetic features of "Autumn Begins" include striking diction and imagery. Such evocative phrases include: "nursing long beers," "gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace," "ruptured night watchmen," "their women cluck like starved pullets," and "gallop terribly against each other's bodies." Moreover, Wright uses clever links between words. For example, the phrase "Dying for love" is soon followed by "suicidally beautiful." The poet also inserts irony into "Autumn Begins," as in the line, "the proud fathers are ashamed to go home."

While the free verse style of the poem does not provide the reader with metric structure, it does correspond to the content of the poem. The narrator, who remains unidentified throughout the poem, speaks in a reflective tone. He or she wishes to remain an observer and does not reveal anything about him or herself. The focus of the poem is on the people and situations described by the narrator. While any judgments made about life in Martins Ferry, Ohio are subtle, the tone of the poem becomes dark and almost foreboding. Diction is the key to conveying such a tone; the poet chooses such words as "starved," "dying," "suicidally," and "terribly." Even at the beginning of the poem, images of gray-faced "Negroes in the blast furnace," and "ruptured night watchmen" build an atmosphere of depression. While the narrator watches an innocent high school football match, he or she notices that the people in this town do not live lives of joy.

Especially morose are wives, depicted directly as possessions of the fathers: "their women." The men, "ashamed to go home," neglect their spouses and fail to provide enough love. Consequentially, the women are starving for love. Yet Wright does not state this outright. Instead, he divides the cliche "love starved" into two separate lines: "the women cluck like starved pullets, / Dying for love." The last line of the second stanza, "Dying for love," underscores the intensity of their loneliness. The husbands are ashamed, perhaps because their work is unrelenting, unfulfilling, and underpaid, while the wives suffer emotional deprivation and a lack of intimacy.

Indeed, the basic theme of "Autumn Begins" is that of loneliness. Even amid a crowd at a high school football game, the narrator and those around him seem caught up in the miseries of working-class existence. Wright seems to draw a connection between the atmosphere of the people and the brutality of the sport they observe by beginning the third stanza with the word "therefore." The narrator concludes, based on his observations at the stadium, that the sons "grow suicidally beautiful." That phrase is probably the most complex of the entire poem. It is essentially an oxymoron, for beauty and suicide do not mix. This contradiction parallels the theme of the illusory nature of the American Dream.