Monday, February 28, 2011

Sign Inventory 1, Week 7

Kate Northrop's "The Dog"

-8 stanzas, 1-3 lines each
-stanzas 4 and 5 are the only 3-line stanzas
-made up of four sentences, all enjambed
-sense of mystery in the language: "glitter/ though nothing is written", "dark [...] slick", "nothing's there", "drifts", "impossible to know"
-real and dreamlike coexist ("out of the closed door of my dreams" and "washing dishes", "he's off instantly into the woods")
-the middle lines of both three-line stanzas are indented, along with second lines in the 1st and 6th stanza
-"Washing dishes", "the living room", and "a vase" appear near the center of the poem, among otherwise natural images (dog, field, flower, river, woods)
-recurring theme of absence (nothing written on the tags, the dog isn't really there, he trails after a missing thing)
-no rhyme scheme
-the word "persist" appears in two lines in a row

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