Making Poetry More Accessible — Repetition

Making Poetry More Accessible — Repetition

It’s easy to overlook the value of simplicity in writing. My creative writing students often begin the course — which opens with a focus on poetry — with flashy displays, purple prose, and a great deal of attention on rhyming couplets. There’s nothing wrong with having a taste for those elements. The problem becomes that a focus exclusively on those elements doesn’t invite much of a conversation beyond everyone throwing around vague praise for a poem’s “flow.”

And if there’s a way to have an entire conversation about flow, I haven’t figured it out yet.

Imagery makes for conversation since it lets us talk about associations and set us up for thinking about figurative language. Titles let us talk about expectations. Turning points let us talk about change. And while we’re talking about change, it helps to take a look at a poem’s use of repetition.

Wait, what?

How does repetition invite conversation about change?

The More Things Stay The Same, The More They Change

When John Hammond sets out to prove to his investors that he has control over the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, his primary antagonist is the chaotician Ian Malcolm. Far from being the kind of anarchist Hammond fears, Malcolm is a mathematician claiming that the kind of control Hammond seeks is at odds with the nature of the universe. He later demonstrates this concept for Ellie (and the audience) through a minor experiment:

It changed. Why? Because tiny variations — the orientation of the hairs on your hands, the amount of blood distended in your vessels, imperfections in the skin — microscopic…Never repeat and vastly effect the outcome.

The point Malcolm is making is that true repetition is never possible since the conditions are changing.

Let’s take a quick look back at Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” again, specifically the final stanza, where we identified a turning point previously:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.

Read those last two lines to yourself aloud. Record it if you can and play it back. I doubt you read both lines the same way, with the same emphasis and intonation. You likely pause between “go” and “before” in the second line. In the first line you likely read “sleep” with a high intonation (above how you read “I”), but in the second reading it gets lower (equal to or lower than how you read “I”).

They are written nearly the same on the page (exception punctuation) but the repetition is not exact. So what changes? The fact that the line gets repeated.

When you read the third line of the stanza, it’s fresh. You read it with the same attention you may give to any of the previous ones. But once you read the final line, you recognize that it’s similar and this realization necessarily impacts the meaning.

Why repeat the line at all?

In the case of “Stopping by Woods…” the speaker is mesmerized by the beauty of this moment, like Odysseus mesmerized by the sirens’ song. He knows he has to move on, but it takes a great deal of effort to overcome his momentum. We often repeat commands to ourselves when we’re talking ourselves into doing something we don’t want to do (or your parents repeat it for you if you haven’t internalized that drive yet).

In this way, repetition can be a form of crescendo, directing emphasis to the importance of a certain element.

The use of repetition can also be a reframing tool, drawing your attention to contrast. Taking a look back at Ocean Vuong’s “Aubade with Burning City,” we notice the repeated call-and-response from the beginning and the end:

Open, he says.

She opens.

Here we have the same lines with the exact same formatting. But what has changed? The details and the context around them. The repetition of the lines in a fresh context snaps our attention back to the start of the poem. The tranquility and charm of the poem’s opening imagery (champagne, milkflower petals, bright) contrast against the details of the second (lights go out, nun on fire). We may wish for things to be like they were before, but they never will be again.

Repetition is such a simple tool in the poet’s toolbox, but it can have an enormous impact on the reading of a poem. Though simple, it can reveal a great deal of complexity. It allows the poet to direct the reader’s attention is multiple ways.

Some wonderful poems that utilize repetition to direct our attention:

Carlos Drummond de Andre’s “In The Middle Of The Road”

Joy Harjo’s “Remember”

Maggie Smith’s “Good Bones”

Leave a comment below sharing some of your favorite poems that demonstrate the power of repetition. And leave a comment below sharing some of your favorite poems that demonstrate the power of repetition.

More in this series: