<P> Meyers calls theme "the central idea or meaning of a story . It provides a unifying point around which the plot, characters, setting, point of view, symbols, and other elements of the story are organized ." The theme of "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" is "the dying of the sentimentalized West with the encroachment of the lifestyle of the civilized East". The old west that once was is fading and very little is left . Scratchy Wilson is a leftover of that time . He was once a member of a wild west gang; now he is just a childlike drunk residing outside of town . Moreover, even though Scratchy is a symbol of a bygone era, he has been changed . He wears clothing from "some Jewish woman on the East Side of New York" and boots that were "beloved in winter by little sledding boys". These items that he wears are not things you would find in Texas; they were likely brought in by salesmen or drummers into the town from the East . Scratchy is but a child and when faced with change that he is not ready for, he cowers back to his home with his head sunken . </P> <P> The story takes place in three main locations in the late 1800s: the train, the Weary Gentleman saloon, and outside Sheriff Jack Potter's house . The train and saloon help to set the period . A time where trains are a major form of transportation and in Yellow Sky's case, one of the only ways to get there . The saloon acts as a way to give insight and backstory to the two main characters, Jack and Scratchy . We get a perspective on the two from side characters in the story . The Sheriff's house, an immovable object in Scratchy's warpath, is the final scene of the story . Presently there came the spectacle of a madman churning himself into deepest rage over the immobility of a house . He fumed at it as the winter wind attacks a prairie cabin in the North . To the distance, there should have gone the sound of a tumult like the fighting of two hundred Mexicans . As necessity bade him, he paused for breath or to reload his revolvers . </P> <P> Crane uses a vast amount of imagery in the story, for example; "...Crane used nautical imagery in "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" as a visual reminder of this westward movement . In the passenger - car with its "sea - green figured velvet", a waiter, like a "pilot," is "steering (Potter and his bride) through their meal". Contemplating the best way to sneak into Yellow Sky undetected, Potter envisions himself as a boat, "a plains - craft" - to use a phrase invented by Crane . In the past, when Scratchy terrorized the town, Potter "would sail in and pull out all the kinks in this thing", though this time the boat - like Potter encounters resistance as he and his bride, like two boat sails, "put forth the efforts of a pair walking bowed against a strong wind". Confronted with the stormy Scratchy, the bride becomes a "drowning woman" and Potter, despite attempts to maintain his course of direction, is "stiffening and steadying" while "a vision of the Pullman floated" in his mind as a symbol of his new condition . After Scratchy reluctantly accepts the end of the childlike drama that he and the marshal have repeatedly enacted in the past, he picks up his "starboard revolver", "his throat (working) like a pump" of a steamboat, and drifts away, his feet creating the "funnel - shaped tracks" that form the wake of a boat symbolizing the funeral wake commemorating the passing of the frontier". </P> <Ul> <Li> Howes, Kelly King . Characters in 19th - Century Literature . Detroit: Gale Research, 1993, </Li> </Ul>

The bride comes to yellow sky stephen crane summary