You Will Know When you get there - student summary

 You will know when you get there by Allen Curnow

Here is a summary written by a student two years ago:

You will know when you get there is a poem by Allen Curnow. This poem has a very interesting structure, before even reading it the reader already feels confused and awkward, the poem is made of ten couplets and one tercet. Curnow plays a lot with enjambment as it is present in almost every line. This gives the poem a speaking voice effect, but it takes away the reassuring feeling that a traditional poem would give to a reader. The fact that the poem is in free verse also adds to this effect the reader doesn't know what to expect next, this creates tension. 

Allen Curnow uses assonance with shower and shredding (line 4) thickening and thinning (line 6) ocean and shallowed (line 18), all those sounds are sounds that takes the mouth a lot of effort to pronounce this adds to the tension already presents with the unusual structure. We could also say that the assonance Line 4 and line 18 is using the sound ‘sh’ as imagery for the sound of the waves. In fact, we can observe the lexical field of water throughout the whole poem, sea (l.1) shower (l.4) pouring (l.5) tide (l.17) and more.

Water plays an important part in this poem as it is the dying man’s ultimate goal to reach it. The man is racing against the sun, he needs to get to the sea before the sun sets. Here, the sun represents his life, he knows that when the day will be over so will be his life. The idea of a race creates suspense and tension. Throughout the whole poem we have an extended metaphor of life being represented by light. When talking about the dying man the term light is always accompanied with the idea that it is running out, “with while the light lasts” (l.8) or “one hour’s lights to be left” (l.19). This contrasts with the two boys in line 13. They have “campfire-lit faces”, we have an image of them with faces full of light almost as if they were glowing. They represent youth.  “it gathers the gold against it” line 9/10 is an allusion to Ezra Pound’s poem, Cantos, this phrase adds to the idea of a battle between light and dark it also creates beautiful imagery. As lights represents life it is only logical for darkness to represent death. We can observe that in the first 9 couplets we have the 

lexical field of a struggling light. The man is still fighting for his life. However, in the last tercet we suddenly only have occurrences referring to darkness. The phrase “the sun which get there first” (l. 12/13) suggests that ultimately the man lost the race, he dies before reaching his goal. In the last two verses we have multiple metaphors about death. “the door slams” (l. 20/21) the door represents death, the use of the verb slams suggests that there is no way back. Here, the door is a wave that goes over him and drowns him. The second metaphor line 22 and 23 “into the surge-black fissure” here death is represented as a pitch black fissure we again have the idea that death is dark, those two metaphors enables us to visualise death which creates imagery. 

The last line “down you go alone so late into the surge black fissure” is very interesting for two reasons first the poet is talking directly to the reader by using the pronoun ‘you’. He is no longer talking about the man but about every single one of us. He's telling the reader that they will die and that they will die alone. This adds to the already uncomfortable ambience. We can observe the same phenomenon in the title “You will know when you get there”, again we have the presence of the pronoun ‘you’. This, once again, suggests that the reader will, one day, without doubt be in the same situation as this old man. The title also answers the questions ‘what is death?’ and ‘what does it feel like?’.  

The second reason why that last sentence is interesting is for the idea that you fall into death. We can observe that the word “down” is repeated four times in the poem, this word frames the poem which gives a sense of movements to the poem. We can also find this idea in the metaphor of death being a surge black fissure as the man is falling down that fissure and at the bottom of it lies death. This idea is also represented in the third line of the poem “the last steep kilometre” here “steep” gives us again that downhill motion. In the first and last down, the word is accompanied with the idea that he's alone. “nobody else” line two and “while it lasts” line 22 this suggests that death is lonely, you have to go through it alone and on your own time.           

Here is a YOUTUBE video analyzing the poem.

Here is an online analysis of the poem.