Letter to Someone Living Fifty Years From Now

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2017

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

The Free Verse Epistolary Poem

Literature written in the form of a letter is called epistolary literature. Poems directed to a specific person, place, or object are also called apostrophe poems. The person to whom the letter is written is called the interlocutor. “Letter Written to a Person Living Fifty Years from Now” is an example of both epistolary and apostrophic writing. Because it mimics a typical conversation between two people, the speaker and the hypothetical future interlocutor, the poem employs free verse, a form of writing that does not use rhyme or regular meter but sounds more like typical speech and writing patterns. Using the epistolary form, addressing this future person makes the poem more personal and accessible to a wider audience. The reader is meant to feel this letter could reflect reality, not science fiction. Climate change could affect the common person. Depending on the age of the reader, they might be one of the people living 50 years from now.

Diction

The diction, or the choice of words a poet uses, communicates a lot of information about a speaker’s background, attitude, or perspective. Olzmann frequently uses the diction of a modern speaker, communicating complex ideas in an informal way. In other instances, he uses elevated language more typical of poetry to create vibrant language that draws attention to an image or idea.

In the first stanza, the speaker reveals that the whales are dead because they have been “harpooned or hacked into extinction” (Line 3). The word “harpooned” refers to a specific way that whalers used to capture and kill whales. It is a specific term that sufficiently explains what happened to the whales, but when the poem elaborates on this, saying, “harpooned or hacked into extinction” (Line 3), it emphasizes the killing and its brutal nature. “Hacked” (Line 3) has a hard “k” sound, which sounds more violent than the word “harpooned” (Line 3) and connotes greater brutality enacted carelessly. This word choice reveals the speaker’s attitude: Those who killed the animals were reckless and brutal. The exaggerated effect of the added word also makes the situation somewhat comical, creating a type of gallows humor that draws attention to the absurdity of “hacking” whales apart, making the whalers and the society that would encourage this look both heartless and foolish.

Conversely, other lines use diction more typical of traditional poetry: “seagulls rippled with jet fuel and plastic” (Line 6). Most people would not say “the seagulls’ (stomach was) rippled with jet fuel” (Line 6) in everyday speech. This unusual word choice draws attention to the image of the seagull’s stomach being destroyed by the jet fuel and plastic. It draws attention to the gruesomeness of the destruction without humor.

Line Breaks

Line breaks can draw attention to important words in a poem and can sometimes create alternate meanings, such as in the second stanza: “It must seem like we sought to leave you nothing / but benzene, mercury” (Lines 4-5). The line break on “nothing” (Line 4) emphasizes the lack of something. This could be a sentence on its own, so the break creates two possible sentences, which have two meanings: “It must seem like we sought to leave you nothing” (Line 4) means that the current generation did not leave anything at all for the following generation. Reading the rest of the sentence changes the meaning from leaving nothing to leaving “nothing / but benzene, mercury” (Lines 4-5). This changes the line to mean the past generation will leave something behind, but those things will only be agents of destruction, which harm the environment. The speaker infers that by not cleaning up chemical waste their generation will essentially leave the next generation with nothing.

Olzmann plays on various meanings again in the stanza with another line break: “the stomachs / of seagulls rippled with jet fuel and plastic” (Lines 5-6). The words Olzmann emphasizes here are “stomachs” (Line 5) and “plastic” (Line 6). Stomachs connote hunger but also greed. Saying that the current generation will leave the next generation nothing but stomachs implies that they will leave the future generations with hunger, and also with the consequences of their own greed and appetite. The line continues with “of seagulls […]” (Line 6), which changes the meaning from “stomachs” in general to the stomachs of seagulls specifically. These stomachs are “rippled with jet fuel and plastic” (Line 6). The stomach, which is meant to digest plants and meat, and to absorb nutrition, is not made full but rather “rippled” (Line 6) with refuse. This word choice emphasizes the destructive nature of appetites. One generation’s feeding too much will cause the next generation to have nothing worth eating. This revelation is one of the main themes of the poem.