The poem "On the Subway" by Sharon Olds plays off its title to convey a sense of uncertainty, dread, fear, and urban tension. The poem itself details the feelings experienced by the speaker as she sits on the subway, though the subway itself is not mentioned in the poem itself. The situation is set by the title, and this makes all that follows clear as far as its meaning is concerned. The poet creates a dramatic situation through the eyes of one participant, and while nothing really happens beyond two people observing one another, the poem says much about urban life, racial relations, and accompanying fears.
The first line delineates the situation clearly: "The young man and I face each other" (1). This remains the situation throughout the poem--neither leaves, neither moves, neither approaches the other. We know this is taking place on a subway because of the title, and so we can envision the scene, with the woman seated on one side of the car and the young black man on the other. Much of the nature of this situation comes from our knowledge of recent history, with the subway in New York being seen as a dangerous place where young black males are considered predators and white women as vulnerable victims. The image created in the poem is of a city and society divided, just as the black and white people on the subway are divided by the center aisle of the subway car. The reader knows about the white fear associated with riding the subway from the Bernard Goetz case in New York, where Goetz felt threatened by young blacks and shot them. The dramatic situation in this poem is thus readily apparent.
The women fixates on the way the young man looks: "His feet are huge, in black sneakers/ laced with white in a complex pattern like a/ set of intentional scars" (2-4). She feels isolated and expresses this in the image of the two of them being stuck on opposite sides of the car like "a couple of/ molecules stuck in a rod of...