Tying It Back Home

I grew up in a mostly working-class community. People went into work at eight and came back home at five in the afternoon. State park jobs, construction, and anything that had to deal in home improvement seemed to be the common methods of gathering income. At the center of the county was a lake where a fair bit of camping and sightseeing was done over the summers. Restaurant and boating jobs always opened up more around that time of year. Honda’s factories were pretty much the life-blood of the nearby towns though.

One of my friends in high school once said Springsteen’s “The River” was like a theme of his life. He was a few years older than me, didn’t go to college, and ended up marrying his high school sweetheart since they’d had the baby. After looking closer at the lyrics, I think I have a better idea of what my friend meant.

The first stanza of the poem explains that the speaker came from an area where you were pretty much destined to do as your father did. This makes the audience wonder if it was the same for his grandfather and so forth.

Later on it explains how the speaker and the girl met in high school and would leave their home to see some green fields and a river. Green fields could be taken as a universal symbol picturing a life of plenty. The river may represent a dream of freedom because the young couple seems to dive into it to get away from the troubles of a working-class life.

As the song progresses, the girl, Mary, gets pregnant and the pair marry. The young man only gets a union card and a wedding coat for his birthday because he now has to take on the responsibility of raising a family. Their trip to the courthouse is just as inglorious because there are no smiles or walks down the aisle. This makes us wonder if the family did not support what had just happened between the two or if maybe everyone is simply too poor to afford the costs of a traditional wedding.

The speaker gets a job with a construction company and mentions that times are hard because of the economy and not having much work. He reminisces about old dreams he had as a younger man but acts as if they don’t exist and even his wife “acts” as if she shares the opinion. Yet even as their chances for dreams have seemed to pass away, the man remembers a time when the two would go on car rides and lie next to each other beside the river. These memories trouble his mind like a curse. This grants us an image that these thoughts have apparently been stuck with him for some time and maybe even indefinitely. The man regrets not being able to have lived his dreams and despite his river dream being “dry” he still thinks about it.