Contents: IntroductionPoem Summary Themes Critical Overview Criticism Sources For Further Study |
Style
“Starlight” is a free verse poem, almost artless in its construction. The tone is conversational, as if the speaker is recounting the memory at an intimate gathering of friends. This tone is fitting for the anecdotal quality of the poem. Although Levine does not use much rhyme in this poem, he does use repetition, and light use of synaesthesia to give the memory a dreamlike character. Apposition, a grammatical construction in which a noun or a noun phrase is placed with another as an explanatory equivalent, is a form of repetition which Levine uses in the following lines:
and the voice, my father’s voice, is nothis voice, but somehow thick and choked,a voice I have not heard before, butheard often since.....These lines thicken the description of the father’s voice and readers have to slow down to digest them, just as the child in the poem has to slow down because he cannot understand the word “happy.”
Contributing to the dreamlike quality of the memory is the quietly surreal imagery, as found in the lines, “The cigarette is gone, but I can smell / the tiredness that hangs on his breath.” Describing one sense in terms of another or using one type of stimulation to evoke the sensation of another is known as synaesthesia and was a favorite technique of both the surrealists of the early twentieth century and some poets of the late twentieth-century, Levine among them, who at various points in their careers have been named “neo-surrealists.” These poets include Mark Strand, James Wright, Robert Bly, Diane Wakowski, and others.
