Where I Come from by Elizabeth Brewster
Where I come from
Elizabeth Brewster
People are made of places. They carry with them hints of jungles or mountains, a tropic grace or the cool eyes of sea-gazers. Atmosphere of cities how different drops from them, like the smell of smog or the almost-not-smell of tulips in the spring, nature tidily plotted in little squares with a fountain in the centre; museum smell, art also tidily plotted with a guidebook; or the smell of work, glue factories maybe, chromium-plated offices; smell of subways crowded at rush hours.
Where I come from, people carry woods in their minds, acres of pine woods; blueberry patches in the burned-out bush; wooden farmhouses, old, in need of paint, with yards where hens and chickens circle about, clucking aimlessly; battered schoolhouses behind which violets grow. Spring and winter are the mind’s chief seasons: ice and the breaking of ice.
A door in the mind blows open, and there blows a frosty wind from fields of snow.
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Biographical Information
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•
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Elizabeth Brewster was born in 1922 in the small lumber town of Chipman,
New Brunswick, Canada.
As a young poet in the 1940s, Elizabeth Brewster wrote in an almost desperate attempt to order the chaos of her own psyche.
Most of Brewster’s early poetry was based on rural and small-town rather than urban experience and that it was mainly traditional in form. The bulk of her poems centre around trees, oceans, cabins and childhood recollections, lulling the reader into a state of rustic complacency.
Summary
The key idea of the poem seems to be that a person’s character is always formed at least in part by the place where he or she is born – “People are made of places”. Wherever you go in life you will carry with you memories and echoes of your birthplace, whether it is a city, as in the first stanza, or the quiet Canadian countryside where Elizabeth herself was born –
“Where I come from, people carry woods in their minds” –
Elizabeth Brewster
People are made of places. They carry with them hints of jungles or mountains, a tropic grace or the cool eyes of sea-gazers. Atmosphere of cities how different drops from them, like the smell of smog or the almost-not-smell of tulips in the spring, nature tidily plotted in little squares with a fountain in the centre; museum smell, art also tidily plotted with a guidebook; or the smell of work, glue factories maybe, chromium-plated offices; smell of subways crowded at rush hours.
Where I come from, people carry woods in their minds, acres of pine woods; blueberry patches in the burned-out bush; wooden farmhouses, old, in need of paint, with yards where hens and chickens circle about, clucking aimlessly; battered schoolhouses behind which violets grow. Spring and winter are the mind’s chief seasons: ice and the breaking of ice.
A door in the mind blows open, and there blows a frosty wind from fields of snow.
5
10
15
20
Biographical Information
•
•
•
Elizabeth Brewster was born in 1922 in the small lumber town of Chipman,
New Brunswick, Canada.
As a young poet in the 1940s, Elizabeth Brewster wrote in an almost desperate attempt to order the chaos of her own psyche.
Most of Brewster’s early poetry was based on rural and small-town rather than urban experience and that it was mainly traditional in form. The bulk of her poems centre around trees, oceans, cabins and childhood recollections, lulling the reader into a state of rustic complacency.
Summary
The key idea of the poem seems to be that a person’s character is always formed at least in part by the place where he or she is born – “People are made of places”. Wherever you go in life you will carry with you memories and echoes of your birthplace, whether it is a city, as in the first stanza, or the quiet Canadian countryside where Elizabeth herself was born –
“Where I come from, people carry woods in their minds” –