Themes and Meanings
“Returning” is a poem about the aftermath of an ecstatic moment, presumably a sexual climax. The experience is so intense and pleasurable that it must be considered otherworldly rather than a part of the poet’s ordinary life. It also appears, at least at the climactic moment, to be a solitary experience. It is only as the woman floats down to the harsher realities of the earth that her husband starts to come into view. However, this is also a poem about a meaningful relationship: The woman lands in the garden that she and her husband cultivate, plant, tend, and harvest together. It is a product of partnership with a “brief but brilliant” interlude of solo flight. The poem is not particularly erotic, but it is highly attentive to the senses of the subject as she passes between states of being. The association of sex with flight has been used in poetry before, but Pastan’s particular use of a falling parachutist to illustrate the subject’s return to her ordinary life is striking. Falling through the air in a parachute must necessarily be an exhilarating but brief experience. The poem is also unusual in being situated around the transitional moments rather than being firmly rooted in one state or the other.
Although the ecstatic experiences are achieved by different means, two other well-known poems provide a comparison to Pastan’s passage between the worlds of the ecstatic and the ordinary. In John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” the...
(The entire section is 460 words.)