More than anything else what lingers on in the mind after
reading this book is the intense, passionate and above all evocative way that the
landscape of the frontier is described in this work and in Cather's literature as a
whole. Throughout the text, Willa Cather's immense love and yearning for the freedom of
the prairies becomes evident. One description that is classic of this feeling comes in
the second chapter of the book, when the narrator has just arrived in his new home and
is exploring:
I can remember exactly how the country looked to
me as I walked beside my grandmother along the faint wagon-tracks on that
early September morning. Perhaps the glide of long railway travel was still with me, for
more than anything else I felt motion in the landscape; in the fresh, easy-blowing
morning wind, and in the earth itself, as if the shaggy grass were a sort of loose hide,
and underneath it herds of wild buffalo were galloping,
galloping...
Consider how the
comparison of the earth to the herd of wild buffalo and how this helps communicate a
sense of the motion of the landscape. Such stylistic techniques help to perfectly
capture the apparent movement of the land with the grass moving with the wind,
reflecting the intensely natural aspect of the environment and how it is able to spark
the imagination, in the same way that it has done to the
narrator.
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