I Was My Own Route

Upon reading "I Was My Own Response", I was able to conclude that I probably won't ever understand Julia de Bugos. The poem starts out by saying that she wants to be like men want her to be. My interpretation of that was that she could possibly be being used by men in general. But I think that the overall message of this poem is her statement that she wants to change certain aspects in her life. Earth does not accept walking backwards, something that she may want to do. Her walking backwards could be something that she happens to do differently in life and the earth or its people may not be so accepting to allow her to do this. In the third stanza we find that several things in her life are or will be changing. the "distant familiar horizons" that she describes could be how she is becoming separated from a familiar asepect of her life and is no longer so close to these "horizons". She also talks about "new paths" that she could be taking sometime in the near future. It seems as though everything that she is familiar with is now becoming more and more distant. The poem ends with the final stanza at first sounding just like the first one. However, by the fifth line of the last stanza, she changes what she had already written into something different. The concludes by saying that "the desire to follow men warped in me, and the homage was left waiting for me." She is once again talking about men in her life, but instead she talks about how she is following men rather than men wanting her to live her life in a certain way.