“Wingfoot Lake” by American poet Rita Dove is part of her larger 1986 collection Thomas and Beulah, which won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Thomas and Beulah, Dove’s third poetry collection, relates the partially fictionalized narrative of her maternal grandparents. The first half of the book, “Mandolin,” focuses on her grandfather Thomas, while the second half, “Canary in Bloom,” focuses on her grandmother Georgianna who is renamed “Beulah” in the book. “Wingfoot Lake” is one of the last poems in Beulah’s narrative, and it depicts part of her life after Thomas, her husband, had already passed.

“Wingfoot Lake” is an example of Dove’s unique ability to combine historical narratives with sensory detail. Many of Dove’s works, including “Wingfoot Lake,” rely on small, often implied, narratives told through fragmented events, action, or dialogue. Dove often combines narrative poetry with her unique approach to historical events to explore racial and class-based injustices. Though Dove has a unique approach to poetry, she is influenced by earlier Black poets, such as Gwendolyn Brooks and Robert Hayden.

Poet Biography

Rita Dove was born on August 28, 1952 in Akron, Ohio. Her father, Ray Dove, was a research chemist for Goodyear tires—one of the first African Americans to hold such a position in the US tire industry. Dove’s mother, Elvira Hord, did not attend post-secondary education but had a love of reading that she passed down to her daughter.

Dove graduated from Buchtel High School in 1970 as a Presidential Scholar, graduated from Miami University in 1973 with a bachelor of arts degree and the title of summa cum laude, and in 1974 received and held a Fulbright Scholarship from University of Tübingen, in West Germany. In 1976, some of Dove’s earliest poems were translated into French and published in Bretagnes. Her formal English poetry debut came in 1980, with the collection The Yellow House on the Corner. Dove graduated with a master of fine arts from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1977. While at the University of Iowa, Dove met German-born writer Fred Viebahn. The two of them married in 1979.

On the strength of her education and her collection The Yellow House on the Corner, Dove obtained a position teaching creative writing at Arizona State University, which she held from 1981 to 1989. Dove’s creative output was at its peak around this time, and she produced three collections of poetry including 1986’s Thomas and Beulah, where “Wingfoot Lake” was first collected after being published in The Paris Review. Thomas and Beulah is indicative of Dove’s refined poetic style that combines history and particular sensory detail. Dove was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1987 for the collection.

The 1987 Pulitzer Prize was the first of many awards and accolades that Dove received during her writing career. From 1993 to 1995, she served as United States Poet Laureate and was the youngest person to hold the position. She has also received, among other awards, the National Humanities Medal, the National Medal of Arts, the Wallace Stevens Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters gold medal. Though poetry constitutes the bulk of Dove’s creative work, with 11 published collections, she has also published one essay collection, one novel, one short story collection, and one verse play. Dove has taught at the University of Virginia since 1989, where she holds the chair of Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing.

Poem Text

Dove, Rita. “Wingfoot Lake.” 1986. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

Rita Dove’s “Wingfoot Lake” tells a narrative through a series of fragments. Though the poem never states her name directly, it can be assumed, based on the poem’s placement in the “Canary in Bloom” section of 1986’s Thomas and Beulah, that Beulah is the narrative’s subject. Similarly, the context provided in the poem’s parenthetical subtitle, “Independence Day, 1964,” orients the poem and informs the reader of the work’s occasion.

However, the poem’s first stanza begins prior to 1964, on Beulah’s “36th birthday” (Line 1). This stanza tells a short narrative of when “Thomas had shown her / her first swimming pool” (Lines 1-2). Beulah and Thomas, her husband, watch “the swimmers’ white arms jutting / into the chevrons of high society” (Lines 4-5) before Beulah rolls her car window up and tells Thomas to “drive on, fast” (Line 7).

The next stanza shifts to another time, presumably the “Independence Day, 1964” that the poem’s subtitle suggests. This second stanza relates what the speaker calls an “act of mercy” (Line 8). Beulah’s “four daughters” (Line 8) take her to “their husbands’ company picnic” (Line 9). The speaker notes the “white families on one side” (Line 10) and the various items, such as “Salem potato chip[s]” (Line 13), that both white and Black families brought to the picnic. The stanza then reveals that this is Beulah’s first “Fourth of July” (Line 15) after Thomas died. The end of the second stanza then jumps back “ten years ago” (Line 15), and the third quickly jumps “ten years before that” (Line 17), to when “the girls [were] like young horses eyeing the track” (Line 18). Then the poem moves to only 11 months in the past, to August 1963, when Beulah “stood alone for hours / in front of the T.V. set” (Lines 19-20). The third stanza ends as the poem takes a lyrical turn and begins to relay elements of Beulah’s emotional state.

In the fourth stanza, Beulah grapples with her daughter Joanna’s claim that they are now “Afro-Americans” (Line 25). Beulah questions what Joanna “know[s] about Africa” (Line 26) and wonders if there are “lakes like this one / with a rowboat pushed under the pier” (Lines 27-28) in Africa. Then, the association between bodies of water and Africa moves her, in Lines 30 to 32, to think about the Nile River. Beulah soon settles on the thought that “Where she came from / was the past” (Lines 32-33), and she begins to reminisce on various things that have changed in her lifetime.