Loud Music

The motif of disappearing throwing the poem’s characters into relief. The speaker likes “the speakers / throbbing, jam-packing the room with sound” (Lines 2-3) and “the volume cranked up so / each bass note is like a hand smacking the gut” (Lines 4-5). However, this discomfits his stepdaughter: “With music blasting, she feels she disappears, / is lost within the blare” (Lines 9-10). The speaker, an older man who has established a place in the world, wants to lose his sense of self within the loud sounds; the stepdaughter, however, is young—she has not established a place for herself yet, so being drowned out by the loud music is disorienting.

The motif of disappearing recurs when the speaker imagines his ideal view in a magical box: a “rocky coast with a road along the shore / where someone like me was walking and has gone” (Lines 23-24). While the landscape he sees is highly described and defined (“wind / and thick cloud make the water gray and restless” (Lines 19-20), the speaker has become a vague “someone” and then vanishes altogether, possibly insinuating the speaker’s eventual death. The final image of the poem praises the wildness of the ocean and listening to music loudly because each “wipes out the ego” (Line 25) and the sense of self.