Nostalgia in "Where I Come from"

"Where I Come From" is a poem in which Elizabeth Brewster expresses her nostalgic emotions and yearning for the tranquility and yearning for the nature of her hometown. The vivid imagery, which stimulates the readers' senses plays an important role in intensifying the vehemence of her emotions. Brewster also expresses her nostalgia in a way that makes readers empathise with her strong yearning. The lack of rhyming scheme in this piece conveys a sense of fickleness and unsureness.

"People are made of places," she says, which I believe specifically means that people are made of places that they belong to, that people do not "carry with them hints of" manmade cities and skyscrapers because they do not belong there, but they belong in the "jungles and mountains" as mankind itself is a piece of nature. Furthermore, Brewster uses "people" as a metaphor for herself, thus being the reason for her intense yearning.

"Smell of smog" in the fourth line radiates a strong imagery of the blurry matter, blinding people from the pathway of their goals. Therefore, the phrase represents Brewster's melancholy and strong sense of uncertainty. Her description of the scent of spring as "the almost-not-smell of tulips" conveys a sense of disappointment as not even a single whole thing of nature remains in the synthetic world of the modern age. Brewster then mentions the scent of museums, the scent of old, once-functional items that are kept only for the sake of history. This serves as a medium to further convey her nostalgia. She then mentions the scent of "work, glue factories", "chromium-plated offices", and "subways". Her choice of mentioning only the dullest and most mundane scents of the contemporary realm depicts her dissatisfaction with it, in comparison to what her old settlement had to offer.

"Burned-out", "old", and "battered", she describes her hometown, yet she still yearns for it. From this, it is concluded that it is not the quality of the items she seeks, but the