21 pages • 42 minutes read
Robert CreeleyA Wicker Basket
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1991A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Eating
While “A Wicker Basket” devotes much of its space to action-oriented syntax discussing relatively inactive scenes (waiting for a “headwaiter,” “Picking up change,” leaving a restaurant “Out the door,” getting “in back” of a friend’s car, etc.) (Lines 2, 5, 13, 18), there is a notable activity which the text highlights: eating. Food and eating already haunt the first few lines of the poem, which describe the “time when it’s later” at the end of an implied meal (Line 1). The poem contains seven full stanzas, the first three of which are devoted to postprandial activities. When the poem and its speaker finally do leave the restaurant behind, they quickly return to the culinary motif with the image of the “slice of apple pie” à la mode (Line 22).
One of the most dramatic stanza breaks in the poem occurs right before its conclusion: at the end of the pie image, the speaker says that he “eats it— // Slowly” (Lines 24-25). The stanza break in the middle of a clause, particularly one emphasized by both an em dash and an opening-stanza capitalization, heavily weights the importance of eating and savoring to the poem. While the restaurant scene of the poem’s first half seemed largely incidental at first, the poem’s return to eating by means of metaphor at its conclusion demonstrates the symbolic weight of food in Creeley’s text.
The experiences which life presents to the speaker are like a sumptuous “slice of apple pie” (Line 22), offered as something to be tasted, chewed, and ingested. The speaker does not devour the pie but, with great deliberateness, “Slowly” (Line 25) eats it, appreciating its taste and absorbing its nutrients. With this, eating becomes a symbol for a means of living. The elements of life, from restaurants to nature’s “very huge stars, man, in the sky” (Line 21), can be understood as delicious and energy-giving delights to be savored. In this way, the poem’s symbolic use of food works to communicate its essential themes.
Night Street
The speaker of “A Wicker Basket” moves from one location to another, from a restaurant “ring[ing] out the sound of lively laughter” (Line 4) to the backseat of “old friend Liz[’s]” Cadillac (Line 16). The enclosed spaces that consist of the poem’s two locations recall the titular “wicker basket” (Line 28), in which the speaker “make[s] it” (Line 27). Certainly, the enclosed bubble of space plays an important role in the poem, not the least of which goes toward describing the intoxication which Creeley has stated inspired the text. However, there can be no inside without an outside, and the poem’s discussion of enclosed spaces hinges on the “street like a night, / any night” (Lines 13-14) that appears at its center.
As part of the poem’s preoccupation with America and American identity, the wide-open street under the “very huge stars” (Line 21) works to symbolically represent the possibilities of mid-century American living. When the speaker moves to the night street, he notes that “no one is in sight” (Line 14). Eventually, he cruises under the stars in an American-made car, reflecting on the sensuous delights of living. The speaker is able to find his own definition of contentment (of “mak[ing] it” [Line 27]) in his intoxicated and satisfied personal bubble, but this “wicker basket” of a bubble is possible only under the conditions represented by the symbol of the “street like a night” (Line 13). Namely, the wicker basket is possible only under the infinite possibilities, space, and freedom of a certain kind of American identity.
