The Full Text of “Touch and Go”
The Full Text of “Touch and Go”
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“Touch and Go” Introduction
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"Touch and Go," by English poet Stevie Smith, is an allegory about humankind's struggle to progress. In the poem's symbolic story, a lonesome man—a representative for humanity as a whole—is slowly and painfully crawling "out of the mountains," though he finds himself impeded by his "tail," a surprising appendage that gets caught on the road. The man's slow, uncertain efforts to free himself and move on become an image of humanity's difficulty in leaving behind its base animal impulses and moving toward something like civilization. Smith collected this poem in her 1950 book Harold's Leap.
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“Touch and Go” Summary
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Humanity (in the figure of one symbolic man) is emerging from the mountains—but his tail is stuck in the road. Why doesn't he escape, the speaker wonders? Is he a fool?
Don't be too impatient with him, the speaker says. He's weighed down with strong feeling and worries. He's not out of the mountains yet—he's not even halfway out.
Look at his sad eyes, his bloody cheeks, his forehead, the speaker says. He's lying there with his head in the dirt. Won't anybody help him?
"No, nobody will help him. Leave him to his struggles," yell humanity's old enemies, coughing and spitting.
Humanity's enemies are like trees, the speaker says; they stand there with the sunlight falling on their branches. Won't anybody help my poor man, the speaker asks, as he lies there stuck?
The poor, fragile fellow. He lies there with his head in the stones and dirt. Pray that this bad moment will end, the speaker says, and that humanity's troubles will pass.
Look, the speaker says: the man is moving. That's even better than a prayer. But he's moving so, so slowly. Will he make it out of the mountains, the speaker wonders? Maybe, but it's very uncertain.
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“Touch and Go” Themes
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Humanity's Struggle to Progress
“Touch and Go” tells a strange, allegorical tale in which a man trying to crawl “out of the mountains” becomes the representative for humanity’s struggle to be less wild, less beastly, and more human. One man’s desperate attempt to get himself out of the wilderness here becomes a symbolic image of humanity striving to escape its worst impulses. Whether or not we can do it, this poem suggests, is still an open question; humanity is forever held back by its most brutish qualities.
The poem’s speaker looks on in anguish as this man tries to escape an ominous range of mountains but finds himself stuck: his “tail is caught in the pass” (trapped in the mountain road, that is). The fact that the man has a tail (and that that tail is a big part of what’s holding him back) suggests that there’s still quite a lot of the unevolved monkey in him. If he’s been hanging out in the mountains with his tail, he’s living an animalistic life. Symbolically, he’s just not very civilized.
Nonetheless, he wants to be, the poem implies, and he’s doing his level best to escape the mountains. But his progress is, as the speaker laments, “so slow”: there’s “no one to help him,” he has to do it all on his own, and he doesn’t seem to have many resources at his command. Certainly he has no friends: the only other characters in this poem are the mysterious “enemies of man,” figures who (while they don’t actively get in the way) just stand there and watch while the man struggles, perhaps suggesting the temptation to complacently accept the way things are now. All that keeps the man going is sheer determination. Even as he falls “with his face in the rubble,” appearing defeated, he keeps on “mov[ing],” inch by painful inch.
Allegorically, this vision suggests that this is how human history works (and perhaps how the human psyche works, too). People and civilizations struggle valiantly against their most primitive, animal instincts, hampered and dragged back at every step. Whether humanity will ever make it “out of the mountains” to a more civilized and enlightened way of being, this poem concludes with a mixture of cynicism and persistent hope, is “touch and go”—in other words, it’s a pretty close thing, and there’s no way to guess how it’s going to come out.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-28
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Religious Feeling and Doubt
This poem’s speaker watches a man trying to escape the mountains—a symbolic image of humanity trying to progress. Sympathizing with this poor man’s pathetic-yet-persistent efforts but unable to directly help, the speaker’s thoughts start to turn to religious solutions: they pray for the man’s success. But just as they really can’t be sure whether the man’s pitiful striving will be enough to do the trick, they also can’t quite decide whether or not to believe that their prayers might be answered. Through subtle allusions to religious faith and practice, this poem quietly points out that one of life’s many burdens is grappling with the problem of faith: the existence or non-existence of a higher power.
After anxiously watching the crawling man’s efforts to free himself from where he’s “caught in the pass” on his way out of the mountains (and often wondering if anyone at all is going to “help him”), the poem’s speaker at last decides that no help is going to appear. Their last resort is to “pray that the moment pass / And the trouble”: to reach out to whatever higher power might happen to be listening and ask for its help in getting the man through his struggles, since assistance on the ground seems lacking.
A moment after the speaker makes their prayer, the fallen man (who has been lying helpless “with his face in the dust”) at last “moves”—an action the speaker at once embraces as “more than a prayer,” a bigger and better thing than any prayer could be. The arrangement of these events, however, might draw readers’ attention to the fact that the man moves after the speaker prays. That might suggest that some divine power has indeed put in an appearance here, giving the man the strength to struggle on.
Equally, though, it might not have! The man’s movement might just be his own dogged force of will; he remains “so slow” and his escape from the mountains still seems “touch and go,” deeply uncertain. There’s ultimately no way for the speaker to tell whether their prayer has done any good or not, and if a higher power has indeed intervened, it certainly hasn’t made things very much easier for the poor man.
The poem thus depicts not only humanity’s uncertain struggle to progress, but its uncertain struggle with the divine. Life on earth, the image of the crawling man suggests, often looks pretty grim—and while there’s a great temptation to hope that some higher power is there to lend a hand, there’s also no way to feel really certain that comforting thought is true.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 21-25
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Touch and Go”
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Lines 1-4
Man is coming ...
... not an ass?“Touch and Go” begins by flinging its readers into the middle of a strange drama. “Man,” the speaker says (meaning humanity in general) is “coming out of the mountains.” Unfortunately for humankind, his “tail is caught in the pass” (that is, his tail is stuck in the mountain road).
Here, a grand vision—humanity making its way out of brooding, nameless “mountains”—immediately collides with a small, specific, surreal image: humanity is represented by a lone guy with a ludicrous tail, and that tail is trapped, making progress awfully difficult. This is not the real world, readers already gather: we’re in a highly symbolic setting. This poem will examine the difficult metaphorical journey that all humanity is trying to make through the vision of a single struggling man held back by his tail, an appendage that symbolically suggests everything that’s still animal in people.
This man seems to be trying to leave a more primitive existence behind: emerging from the “mountains,” he’s leaving a life in the wilderness. But his tail holds him back. He’s “caught” by it. Part of him, then, still seems stuck in these wild mountains, even as another part of him is desperate to leave.
Perhaps this struggling man’s dilemma mirrors the very old human sensation of wanting to be a more upright, civilized, collaborative, harmonious, good kind of person (or society, for that matter) and finding oneself dragged back, over and over again, by primitive survival instinct (say, the terror of not having enough leading to greed and competitiveness, or fears about your own safety leading to violence).
Meanwhile, an opinionated but anonymous speaker looks on, half-anxious, half-annoyed. “Why does he not free himself,” they demand as they watch the man: “Is he not an ass?” That impatient question adds another twist to the poem’s tone. On the one hand, the poem is in the grand realm of allegory: behold this one man standing for all humanity, struggling away from a primitive, animalistic existence! On the other, it’s small, nervous, and everyday: this fallen man with a monkey-tail does seem like a bit of an “ass,” and his struggles look pathetic. Couldn’t he just do a tiny bit better? Couldn’t he pull himself together?
The simultaneous seriousness and ridiculousness of this vision sets this darkly comic poem’s tone. The poem’s form supports that mixed tone, too. Smith uses quatrains (four-line stanzas) and an ABCB rhyme scheme here, two elements of a traditional ballad stanza. But within those traditional borders, the poem uses a strange, scrambling accentual meter, a meter measured by number of strong beats per line rather than organized into regular metrical feet like the da-DUM of the iamb or the DUM-da-da of the dactyl. The speaker tends to use three beats per line but doesn’t always stick to that pattern, and their voice never falls into a predictable rhythm. The resultant sound is at once awkward and sharply, conversationally witty.
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Lines 5-8
Do not be ...
... half out yet. -
Lines 9-12
Look at his ...
... help him now? -
Lines 13-16
No, there is ...
... cough and spit. -
Lines 17-20
The enemies of ...
... Where he languishes? -
Lines 21-24
Ah, the delicate ...
... And the trouble. -
Lines 25-28
Look he moves, ...
... touch and go.
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“Touch and Go” Symbols
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The Man with the Tail
“Touch and Go” can be read as an allegory of human history. Right from the get-go, it's clear that this poem is taking place in a symbolic world: the main character here is one “man,” a single figure standing for all of humanity. He’s doing his level best to crawl out of the wild mountains, but he finds that his “tail is stuck in the pass.” Giving the representative of humanity a tail here, the poem’s speaker symbolically suggests that there’s something animal in human beings that holds them back from leaving a wild, beastly, brutal life behind.
By representing humanity with this figure, the poem suggests that people have to struggle against something primitive and animal in their natures if they want to attain a world where human life isn’t solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Perhaps the poem also suggests that something feels very lonely in humanity’s struggles for goodness and civilization. Think how different the poem would feel if humanity were represented by even two people. All alone, this guy truly has "no one to help him," even with moral support.
Such a view of human beings might have felt particularly apt to Smith as she wrote this poem: she published it in 1950, in the wake of the global horrors of World War II. The man's painful, impeded journey has its own symbolic weight, too, suggesting just how agonizingly slow human progress feels.
The poem’s speaker, looking on and practically biting their nails in anxiety for this man, might—strangely enough—also serve as a symbolic representative of all humanity. Watching human struggles through one’s fingers and wondering if we’re ever going to be able to do better is, after all, a classic human pastime.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 1-4: “Man is coming out of the mountains / But his tail is caught in the pass. / Why does he not free himself / Is he not an ass?”
- Lines 9-11: “Look at his sorrowful eyes / His torn cheeks, his brow / He lies with his head in the dust”
- Lines 21-22: “Ah, the delicate creature / He lies with his head in the rubble”
- Lines 25-28: “Look he moves, that is more than a prayer, / But he is so slow / Will he come out of the mountains? / It is touch and go.”
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The Journey Out of the Mountains
Mountains are traditional symbols of obstacles, challenges, and difficulties. In this poem, the speaker's arduous journey out of ominous mountains symbolizes one kind of difficulty in particular: the difficulty of leaving behind wildness, instinct, and animal impulses to live a better and more human kind of life. As one man (who symbolizes all humanity) tries to escape these mountains, he finds that it's his tail that gets stuck in the "pass" (the mountain road); the part of him that's still animal is the part that feels hard to get free from the mountains. The mountains, then, are the place where human beings still basically have tails, where they're just monkeys fighting to survive.
By presenting the man in a mountain setting, struggling to journey away from the wilderness, the poem suggests that humanity's escape from a primitive, essentially selfish way of being is not going to be easy—and that such a way of being might feel as immovable and massive as ancient rocks.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 1-2: “Man is coming out of the mountains / But his tail is caught in the pass.”
- Lines 7-8: “He is not out of the mountains / He is not half out yet.”
- Line 27: “Will he come out of the mountains?”
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“Touch and Go” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Repetition
Repetitions help to support the poem’s anxious tone, emphasizing just how drawn-out and, well, repetitive the poor crawling man’s struggle feels—and how worried and uncertain the watching speaker is about his success. The anaphora in lines 6-8, for instance, darkly suggests that this man is going nowhere fast:
Do not be impatient with him
He is bowed with passion and fret
He is not out of the mountains
He is not half out yet.These repetitions carry readers from what the man is—weighed down with worries and emotional pain—to what he is not: anywhere near out of the mountains. The anaphora makes it feel as if the speaker is peeking through their fingers at the scene, assessing and reassessing how far along the man is and how good his odds are.
But the big repetition that ties this poem together is the echo on “out of the mountains.” In line 1, the phrase sets the scene: “Man is coming out of the mountains.” In line 7, it’s part of a grim assessment: “He is not out of the mountains.” And in line 27, it’s a nail-biting question: “Will he come out of the mountains?” The line first sets the poem’s conditions, then creates a mood of agonizing suspense: it matters tremendously whether the man can make this terrible crawl, and there’s no guarantee he’s going to do it. The repetition makes it feel as if the speaker is checking and checking again, peeking through their fingers: will he make it? Can he do it?
The speaker’s agony comes through in their repeated question: “Is there no one to help my creature?” “Is there no one to help him now?” The “ancient enemies of man,” meanwhile, scoff: “No, there is no one to help him.” Besides suggesting that the man’s crawl is a solitary trial, these lines make the point that the speaker is helpless here, too: they can do nothing to help, but only watch and “pray.”
Where repetition appears in the poem:- Line 1: “Man is coming out of the mountains”
- Line 6: “He is”
- Line 7: “He is,” “out of the mountains”
- Line 8: “He is”
- Line 12: “no one to help him”
- Line 13: “no one to help him”
- Line 19: “no one to help,” “creature”
- Line 21: “creature”
- Line 27: “Will he come out of the mountains?”
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Idiom
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Simile
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Alliteration
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"Touch and Go" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Pass
- Ass
- Bowed with passion and fret
- Languishes
- Rubble
- It is touch and go
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(Location in poem: Line 2: “his tail is caught in the pass”)
A route through mountains.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Touch and Go”
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Form
“Touch and Go” is an allegory. In this symbolic story, a single “man” trying to crawl out of ominous mountains, hampered by his odd monkey-like “tail,” becomes the representative of all humanity making its desperate struggle to escape a wilderness of animalistic, primitive behavior and become more civilized, more decent, more human.
The poem uses a form that’s at once conventional and strange. Glancing at the poem, readers might expect it to be a ballad: it uses an ABCB rhyme scheme and quatrains (four-line stanzas—seven of them, in this case), as that old form does. The meter, however, isn’t steady common meter (as it would be in a ballad), but an unpredictable accentual meter—that is, a meter that doesn’t use regular feet, but measures lines out by the number of strong stresses they use. Here, even that pattern isn’t exactly clear: while most lines hover around three or four stresses, their rhythms are so changeable and abrupt that there’s no way to regularly mark out the poem’s beat.
These choices make the poem feel abrupt, startling, and oddly funny. By putting these swerving rhythms into what would otherwise be a traditional stanza shape, Smith creates a fitting tone of suspenseful uncertainty and struggle. The lurch of the poem’s rhythms works against the traditional form of its rhymes and stanzas, a fitting effect in a poem about humanity’s desperate (and extremely uncertain) crawl toward, well, humanity, something better than the wildness of the symbolic “mountains.”
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Meter
There’s a kind of meter in “Touch and Go,” but a very strange one. Smith uses a rough accentual meter—that is, a meter measured by number of stresses per line, not arranged into a regular pattern of metrical feet like iambs or dactyls. For the most part, the poem’s lines use either three or four strong stresses (though some just use two). But those stresses fall in such unpredictable places that there’s not exactly a regular beat to tap out here. Even in the relatively regular third stanza, the poem’s rhythm feels awkward:
Look at his sorrowful eyes
His torn cheeks, his brow
He lies with his head in the dust
Is there no one to help him now?Certainly there are three beats a line here, but they fall in such odd places (as in the colliding stresses of “torn cheeks”) that the poem, like the crawling man, can’t get up any rhythmic momentum.
The final stanza provides an even better example of the poem’s metrical irregularity:
Look he moves, that is more than a prayer,
But he is so slow
Will he come out of the mountains?
It is touch and go.Not a beat one could dance to! But that’s the point: the scrambling, strange rhythms here suit the man’s struggle and the observing speaker’s anxiety. These informal, almost conversational rhythms also help to give the poem its darkly comical tone.
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Rhyme Scheme
The poem’s meter is peculiar, but its rhyme scheme is an old-fashioned one. Each stanza’s rhymes run as follows:
ABCB
This is a pretty traditional rhyme scheme, the sort one would hear in a ballad or a hymn. Stevie Smith plays some fun tricks within this familiar pattern, though—for instance, by matching “branches” and “languishes” in a surprising slant rhyme, or by bringing in a startling earthy rhyme to cap a more ordinary word: “it” meets “spit,” “pass” meets “ass.”
Still, set against the poem’s metrical irregularity, the rhymes here feel almost methodical. In their old-fashioned regularity, they help to set the tone. Readers understand that they’re watching a highly symbolic struggle here, and the formal rhyme scheme supports Smith's depiction of an allegorical, stylized world.
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“Touch and Go” Speaker
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The poem’s speaker is a sympathetic, alarmed observer, looking on as a man—here a symbol for all of humankind—makes his painful way “out of the mountains,” crawling over “rubble” and finding that he’s “caught in the pass,” stuck in the road and unable to go on. The speaker seems to feel great sorrow and pity for this poor fellow, and perhaps even some responsibility: they call him “my creature” at one point, a line that might either suggest affection or the parental claim of a creator god.
Clearly, however, this speaker can’t directly help this man—that, or they take a strictly noninterventionist attitude toward human goings-on. While they look on with pain, outrage, and flickers of hope at the man’s struggles, they also don’t directly try to help, merely asking: “Is there no one to help him now?” They do, however, invite readers to “pray” that the man's troubles might pass, suggesting that only divine aid can do him any good.
In a strange way, this speaker might be read as a representative of all humanity, just as much as the central struggling man is. Their anxiety about whether humanity is going to make it is, after all, a very human one!
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“Touch and Go” Setting
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"Touch and Go" is set in a strange, symbolic world, in which humanity (embodied as a single “man”) must try to make his way “out of the mountains.” These mountains clearly are not any particular mountains in our world, not the Alps or the Andes: they’re just The Mountains, symbolic embodiments of wildness, difficulty, fear, and trouble. The image of man coming out of the mountains but getting his monkey-like “tail […] caught in the pass” might also suggest that these mountains represent a more primitive way of approaching the world. Humanity, in this vision, is trying to escape living among the rocks like a caveman, to advance, to become more human and less animal.
Stevie Smith published this poem in 1950, not long after the end of World War II; she’d also lived through the dreadful bloodshed of World War I. Her vision of humanity struggling to emerge from a dark, forbidding, rocky landscape seems inflected by all the horrors of the first half of the 20th century, a period when civilization as humanity knew it seemed on the verge of collapse. To many people who lived through those times, the survival and advancement of humanity felt particularly “touch and go” in the wake of the Holocaust and Hiroshima.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Touch and Go”
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Literary Context
Stevie Smith (1902-1971) was a British poet and novelist whose art mingled the light and the dark. Many of her poems unite bleak subject matter with a breezy tone; her most famous poem, "Not Waving But Drowning," is a prime example. "Touch and Go" fits right into that tradition: its strange humor and its tale of faint hope in the face of terrible odds are classic Smith. She first collected this poem in her 1950 book Harold's Leap.
Readers might trace Smith's artistic lineage back to Victorian poet Edward Lear. Like Lear, Smith wrote and illustrated melancholy poetry in the guise of light verse; like Lear, Smith suffered from persistent depressions. Both poets were a little out of step with the world around them, and both found inspiration in their oddity. Critic David Smith once remarked that Smith's work was "so completely different from anyone else’s that it is all but impossible to discuss her poems in relation to those of her contemporaries." By her own description, she was far more deeply influenced by Victorian poets like Tennyson and Robert Browning than by living writers.
It was only toward the end of her life that Smith's genius was more widely recognized. By the time she died in 1971, she had been awarded both the Cholmondeley Award for Poetry and the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. More telling than any kind of public honor, though, is her anonymous afterlife in the English language. Some of her lines—"not waving but drowning" perhaps most notably—are so famous that they've floated free of her work and become proverbial.
Historical Context
Stevie Smith published this poem in 1950, a time when one might reasonably feel pretty bleak about humanity’s capacity to crawl “out of the mountains,” to escape their most inhuman impulses and work to build a civilized world together. World War II had only ended in 1945. The atrocities of the Holocaust, the horrors of Hiroshima, and the battlefield bloodshed across the globe made more people than Smith fear humanity’s unleashed capacity for violence, hatred, and cruelty—and wonder if we might ever make it “out of the mountains.”
The poem does also express a desperate hope that humanity might be able to do a little better. This, too, was an attitude that gained currency in the wake of World War II, a counter to despair. The postwar ‘50s saw growing dreams that technological advancements could bring about a harmoniously mechanized future, a time in which people could leave labor to the robots and dedicate themselves to the peaceful improvement of the species. (Sound familiar?) Smith’s speaker here seems not so sure about that kind of bushy-tailed commercial optimism; their sense is more that humanity will go on struggling to do a little better and a little better, but might never fully succeed.
In this sense, the poem is timeless. With its allegorical vision of dark mountains in which a degraded humanity crawls along only by dint of dogged persistence and desperate “pray[er],” this poem might even reach back to the 1300s to hold hands with Dante and his Divine Comedy.
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More “Touch and Go” Resources
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External Resources
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A Brief Biography — Learn more about Smith's life and work.
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An Interview with Smith — Watch a wonderfully peculiar BBC interview in which Smith reads and discusses her poetry.
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Smith's Drawings — Take a look at a selection of Smith's drawings. She illustrated much of her verse.
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Smith's Strangeness — Read an essay about Smith that discusses her unsettling, unclassifiable style.
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Smith's Legacy — Read an appreciation of Smith written on the 50th anniversary of her death.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Stevie Smith
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