The Poetry Of Linda McCarriston

12 Pages 3020 Words

ense of boundaries and parameters like the ones that boxed in the violence in her household and contained it there. The last line of the first stanza continues into the first line of the second stanza that begins with the word “remembrance”. This word is important, as it tells the reader that the narrator is reaching into her/his darkened past and remembering. Using only coma’s to pause for breath, the narration continues. The poem contains eleven lines before the sentence ends with a firm period in the middle of the second to last line in the third stanza. By the time the reader gets to the end of this long sentence they need to take a breath physically and emotionally.
In the second stanza the narrator refers to the “man” in the first stanza repeating “he”. The repetition of “he” is significant: “he gets…”, “he needs…”, “…his hand,” referring to the man in the first part of the poem, the doer of all the actions, the ego that takes and gets. The reader does not fully know yet what is happening; howe...