Wingfoot Lake

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1986

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Symbols & Motifs

Bodies of Water

“Wingfoot Lake” names four different bodies of water: the swimming pool (Line 2), Wingfoot Lake (Line 27), the Mississippi (Line 29), and the Nile (Line 31). Each of these bodies of water is presented as being possessed or owned by someone. The white swimmers and their “arms jutting / into the chevrons of high society” (Lines 4-5) claim the swimming pool. Goodyear owns the “park / under the company symbol” (Lines 35-36) that contains Wingfoot Lake. The speaker describes the Mississippi as “Thomas’ Great Mississippi / with its sullen silks” (Lines 29-30). The Nile, finally, “belonged / to God” (Lines 31-32).

This ownership over particular spaces furthers the poem’s themes of segregation and exclusion. By placing Goodyear and the white people in the pool in these positions of ownership—and in the same position as God, who owns the Nile—the poem suggests that hubris and absurdity are both inherent in private land ownership. This reading is perhaps complicated by the same ownership relation between Thomas and the “Great Mississippi” (Line 29), but the word “Great” implies a tone of reverence and respect toward the Mississippi and its power. Reference to the Mississippi’s “sullen silks” (Line 30) also puts the river in an ownership position.

Corporate Branding

Corporate entities play several symbolic roles in “Wingfoot Lake.” The two major roles are connected to ideas of class and ownership. The company picnic’s “squeeze bottles of Heinz, the same / waxy beef patties and Salem potato chip bags” (Lines 12-13) demonstrate a middle-class lifestyle enjoyed by the Goodyear employees. Food, in works of poetry, can often be a stand-in for economic class. In the 1960s, when these brands were first gaining large market shares, they were more exclusive and not often obtainable by people of the lower classes.

The poem’s title is also a reference to Goodyear Tires and the “white foot / sprouting two small wings” they placed over the lake after buying it (Lines 36-37). Goodyear’s connection with the lake is explicitly mentioned in Line 35. The Goodyear logo itself is interesting insofar as its “white foot” resonates with the “white arms” in the first stanza (Line 4). Moreover, the foot’s “two small wings” give it freedom of movement—the antithesis of Beulah’s experience in segregated America. The logo also invokes the Greek deity Hermes, who is often depicted wearing shoes with two small wings on them. Hermes is a messenger god, often acting as an intermediary between different gods or between gods and humans. Dove plays with these meanings to suggest that the corporate logos themselves contain a message about the influence of corporations and corporate forms of control.

Whiteness

In the poem’s first stanza, the speaker references Thomas’s “favorite color, exactly—just / so much of it” (Lines 3-4). This reference is soon overwritten by the “white arms jutting / into the chevrons of high society” (Lines 4-5), and Thomas’s favorite color is never revealed or mentioned again. In fact, white is the only color mentioned in the poem, and it is referenced in every stanza but the fourth.

White and whiteness symbolize different things at different times in the poem, but because of Dove’s juxtapositions, these meanings blend. In the first stanza, the “white arms” (Line 4) represent a racially segregated upper class from which Thomas and Beulah are excluded. In the picnic scene, this meaning of the word is carried over to the “white families” (Line 10) that stand “on one side” (Line 10) of the park. Later, the speaker refers to the “white streets of government” (Line 22), which symbolize the white-majority government and the White House. In this context, the “crow’s wing [that] moved slowly through” (Line 21) these white streets is a reference to the March on Washington in August of 1963. Finally, the “white foot” (Line 36) in the Goodyear logo is a continuation of Line 4’s “white arms,” and it points toward a white-majority company and the similarities between that and race-based segregation.