Rita Dove’s two sonnets, “Golden Oldie” and “Exit,” demonstrate the power of the American (innovative) sonnet. Without rime or a regular rhythm, these poems, nevertheless, capture two simple dramatic times in the life of a young woman at the beginning of journey through life.
“Golden Oldie”
The speaker of “Golden Oldie” is a young woman who has arrived home, “I made it home early,” but upon hearing a song on the radio that she enjoys, she “get[s] / stalled in the driveway-swaying.” She’s still “at the wheel,” and she is moving to the rhythm of the song while feeling stuck “like a blind pianist caught in a tune / meant for more than two hands playing.”
The speaker then describes the singer of the tune as “a young girl dying to feel alive, to discover / a pain majestic enough / to live by.” But in this description, the reader realizes that the speaker is describing herself instead of Diana Ross’s persona. (In a latter section of the sonnet, the song is revealed by the words, “Baby, where did our love go?”)
The speaker then reports that she turns off the air conditioning, no doubt to hear the song better. She leans back and despite the “film of sweat,” she enjoys listening to the “lament,” which she “greedily took in.” Despite her identifying with this song, she finds some irony in the identification because she was “without a clue who my lover / might be, or where to start looking.”
“Exit”
The speaker in the sonnet titled, “Exit,” is also a young woman, but this speaker, instead of narrating in the first person, as did the speaker in “Golden Oldie,” addresses herself using the poetic self you. She reveals that she has applied for a “visa,” which indicates that must be traveling abroad. And “[j]ust when hope withers, the visa is granted,” she begins.
She feels that suddenly “[t]he door opens to a street like in the movies.” The street while “clean of people, of cats” is her street. She is a bit anxious, however, because of her impending journey. She repeats, “A visa has been granted,” and adds that it has been granted “provisionally,” calling it a “fretful word.”
The speaker then recounts that she has shut windows that “behind you / are turning pink.” But then reports that they always do that “every dawn.” Her mood is painting everything “gray,” while the cab to take her to the airport is waiting. She observes that a suitcase is the “saddest object in the world.”
But once she is on her way, she realizes “the world’s open.” She then observes that the sky is turning pink with the rising of the sun, but she dramatizes that sunrise in a very telling way: “the sky begins to blush / as you did when your mother told you / what it took to be a woman in this life.” At the beginning of her journey, she realizes how inexperienced she is in the ways of the world, but she seems to hold a ray of hope in her heart that things will turn out well.
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