Shopping in Tuckahoe: Reflection

Shopping in Tuckahoe is a very direct poem as of reading it.  It’s about a mother and her daughter, the mother being the speaker, going shopping.  The mother is waiting for her daughter who is looking a pair of jeans and is taking a considerable amount of time to do so.  The mother makes a humorous remark at the beginning of the poem saying, “one could spend year in this parking lot waiting for a daughter to find just the right pair of jeans.”  However, she begins to become enticed by the deals being offered at the mall, garden related things such as seeds, husks, vines, and bare sepals in particular.  A great deal of imagery is used in the second stanza and on, especially when describing the things the mother is buying. 

By the end of the poem in the fourth stanza, it becomes less direct when the speaker makes a sarcastic remark saying, “By the time my daughter reappears, trailing her scarves of pink and green, she will be old enough to drive home alone,” implying once again that her daughter is taking a very long time finding “the perfect pair of jeans.”  I found this poem very easy to understand, mainly because it is relatively direct with only two shifts in mood.  Shopping in Tuckahoe is almost the complete opposite of A Hymn to God the Father by John Donne in terms of how direct it is, especially since Donne uses puns and religious references in the latter poem.