The Sacred Language and Communication Quotes

It sounds like language affects people whether they like it or not. Notice how the teacher's attempt to communicate with the students makes them uncomfortable? It could be because the teacher is asking students something personal, or even difficult to answer: "Where's your sacred place?" But the ability of a question to engage an audience (the classroom and the readers) is part of how this poem uses the power of communication. It's almost as if the language is both asking and enacting at the same time. In other words, the poem mentions that the teacher asks a question, and, as readers, we might begin to think about our own answer to the question.

This is a great example of how the speaker of this poem is showing the reader how language and communication connects people. What is it about words that brings us together? At first the teacher's question seems to make everyone uncomfortable, but once one student opens up, his answer unlocks the answer in several other students. All at once they begin speaking as well.

Now, these lines don't explicitly mention language—or communication. But the poem takes on a metaphorical quality here. The repetition of the car, the image of it moving and filling with music, seems to parallel the actual form and action of the poem. Just like the car is a sacred place full of music, the poem is also becoming a sacred place filling with the music of language, broken lines, images, and conversations between students.

Although this stanza is the final stanza, and it follows a line that suggests the car can take the student away from the "need to speak," these last three lines of the poem embody the dualistic quality of language in this poem. The dual-what? It's sort of like a two-tone car that wants to be two colors at once. In one way, the poem is about how great language is, and how communication brings us together. On the other hand, these last few lines use language as a tool for getting us beyond language to that sacred place where there is no need to "speak, or to answer." It's as if the poem is the embodiment of language in action, both communicating and taking us beyond communication at the same time.