Love Poem

“Love Poem” is composed of twenty-three lines of free, unrhymed verse in one continuous stanza. It employs no formal meter; that is, its lines are not measured in poetic feet (a poetic foot is a unit of stressed and unstressed syllables). Lines themselves are fairly short, the longest four with six syllables each, and twelve with only three. Visually, the column of short lines allows the reader’s eye to fall down the page, mimicking the running, “headlong” (Line 2) creek. Sonically, however, the short lines (particularly the three-syllable lines) slow the reader down. The lines,

when we see it

so swollen

with runoff (Lines 12-14)

encourage the reader to stop, briefly, at the end of each line to allow for the completion of the hard t in “it,” the n in “swollen,” and the double ff in “runoff.”

The speaker may profess a desire to write a poem that rushes like the creek, but the poet makes choices that show she is very much in control.

Two examples of repetition in “Love Poem” are the repeated use of the word “every” (Line 8), and the phrase “we must grab / each other” (Lines 16-17). Repetition is a poetic device that contributes to the