Lost Sister (Style)

Style

“Lost Sister” is a two-part poem of five stanzas. The two stanzas of part one describe the “jade” daughters of China who stayed home. Part two tells of the sister, presumably the “lost” one, who leaves for America. The final stanza judges them both to be “footless.” “Lost Sister” is written in free verse, a poetic form that may appear to be without form, especially when compared to the metrical, rhymed patterns of formal verse patterns such as the sonnet. Instead of meter, free verse relies on the rhythms of word-sound combinations in ordinary speech. Instead of end-rhyme, it relies on patterns of images and metaphors throughout the poem as well as upon varieties of “internal” rhyme, within and among words in the line. You can find the internal rhyme devices of alliteration and assonance, for example, in the first stanza. Alliteration is the repetition of beginning consonants and can be heard in the repeated “m” sounds in line 7: “could make men move mountains.” Assonance, or the repetition of vowel sounds, occurs in the short and long “i” sounds in “glistening like slices of winter melon.” One can almost see and feel the image by listening to the sounds.

Line-length is variable, not prescribed, in free verse; therefore, the poet can break a line according to the sound and emphasis needed. This poem gives great importance, for example, to “Jade” by placing it on a line by itself in the first stanza of the poem; likewise, “footless” in the last stanza. The carefully constructed line breaks in “Lost Sister” frequently lead to a surprising reversal or expansion of meaning from one line to the next. For example, one might expect “But they traveled far” (line 21) to be followed by a distant place. But “In surviving” is no place at all, at least not externally. In giving this line the same grammatical form as other similar lines — “In China,” “In America” — the reader is asked to think of “surviving” as a psychological space where one might carry on another sort of journey. Through this attention to the line, the poem challenges traditional meanings and ordinary expectations. The repetition of parallel phrases such as “In China,” “In America,” and then “in another wilderness” also helps unify the different parts of the poem and establishes the comparisons and contrasts essential to its themes.