: By characterizing her life as filled with "significant toil," Tan contextualizes the grandmother not just as a patient undergoing decay, but as a matriarch who endured decades of hard work. This establishes deep respect and justifies the weight of her final transition. The Internal Struggle: Stanza 2
“From Journeys” resists the typical travel poem’s awe of the exotic. Instead, Keith Tan finds poetry in the ordinary discomforts of movement: the stale coffee, the anonymous hotel room, the longing for a fixed point. It reminds readers that every external journey is also a map of the inner world. from journeys poem analysis keith tan