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- This poem appears to be about going backpacking but isn't.
- Travel used as a metaphor to represents experiences in different relationships seen in "alien pants" and "cinema stubs" and shows their effects on you over time
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- Relationships - "Alien pants", "Cinema stubs" and "The furthest distance I've travelled have been those between people"
- Resonance of past - "I know these are my souvenirs" and "Routine evictions"
- Youth - "Saddled a rucksack"
- Experience - "Saddled a rucksack" and "To this post office"
- Journeys - "On the beaten track, the sherpa pass, between Krakow"
- Freedom - "Sherpa pass", "Krakow" and "Zagreb"
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- Simile - "Curved under it like a meridian" implies narrator is literally shaped by travel, changed through experience. "It came clear as over a tannoy" implies that travel provides moments of clarity and understanding.
- Caesura - "I thought: Yes. This is how to live." This shows certainty and confidence of youthful traveller
- Listing - "On the beaten track, the sherpa pass, between Krakow and Zagreb, or the Siberian white". This shows that the narrator doesn't stay in one place/ one relationship.
- Enjambment - "Siberian white cells of scattered airports" recreates the movement from one place to another. "Throwaway comment" and "Stowaway pressed flower" shows the sadness that things change and the nostalgia for lost exhilaration of life on the road seen in the first three stanzas.
- Semantic field of travel - "Western union" and "Lithuanian"
- Argument markers - "But to this post office" shows the narrator tasing stock and perhaps moving on to a new chapter in life?
- Contrasting language -Mundane words such as "Laundry" and "Bills" are juxtaposed with exotic words like "Krakow" and "Zagreb"
- Extended metaphor - Implies travel has changed from literal seen in the listing of exotic locations to metaphorical of "western union" and "post office".
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- Short lines - "Yes. This is how to leave." implies certainty of narrator
- Long lines - ""So whether it was the scare stories [...] beyond me." The use of long lines shows the narrators increase in thought and lack of certainty
- Unusual layout - "Beyond me. However, When," suggests the process of growing up which is not regular/ predictable
- Half rhyme - "Bills" and "smalls" suggests we are trying to escape constraint through travel
- Line lengths - They even out towards the final stanza which shows the author has learnt from youth experiences and puts them into context
- Rhyming couplets - "Unravelled" & "Travelled", "Survives & "Lives" in the final stanza is the poems way of exploring freedom seen in the rhyming couplets and also shows how the narrator has learnt from her past experiences
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