I love the hour before takeoff, / that stretch of no time, no home / but the gray vinyl seats linked like / unfolding paper dolls.
-- Speaker (Lines 1 – 4)

Importance: The poem begins with these declaratory lines. Rita Dove fixates on the uniform markers of travel such as linked seating in airports. She examines the way such tokens of uniformity re-situate the traveler temporally. Wading through this “no time” requires a kind of letting go of the fixities in one’s own life. For this reason, the traveler, in both a concrete and a figurative sense, has “no home” while in transit. As a traveler one is forced to reckon, whoever fleetingly, with the notion of being adrift in the world. This is an intellectual and emotive sensation that the poet treasures.

Soon we shall / be summoned to the gate
-- Speaker (Lines 4 – 5)

Importance: In these lines the author adopts a playfully formal tone. It is as if the modern ritual...