Words for Departure (Style)

Style

Analogy

Analogy is a common element of poetry, used to suggest a similarity between things that appear on the surface to be dissimilar. For example, the lover is "a rind" with no substance inside. The speaker, on the other hand, is the fruit of the apple, all emotion with no thick skin to protect her. The use of analogy in Bogan's poem is subtle, which means that the reader needs to read the poem carefully to understand all the analogies.

Imagery

Simply put, imagery refers to the images in a poem. The relationships between images can suggest important meanings in a poem, and with imagery, a poet uses language and specific words to create meaning. For instance, Bogan includes images from nature to illustrate the disruption in her natural world. She also includes an image of the lovers' parting, with hands clasped and foreheads touching, an image that reveals the depth of loss that shakes her being. The contrasting images Bogan includes help create tension in the poem and add to its complexity.

Lyric Poetry

Lyric poems are strongly associated with emotion, imagination, and a song-like resonance, especially when associated with an individual speaker or speakers. Lyric poetry emerged during the Archaic Age, around the eighth century B.C. The poems of this time period were shorter than the previous narrative poetry of Homer or the didactic poetry of Hesiod. Since lyric poetry is so individual and emotional in its content, it is by its very nature also subjective. Lyric poetry is also the most common form of poetry, especially since its attributes are common to many other forms of poetry. Bogan's poem combines many of the attributes of lyric poetry, with its emphasis on love and loss and on nature and chaos.

Metaphysical Poetry

Metaphysical poetry began in the seventeenth century as a revolt against the conventions of the Petrarchan poetry so popular in the Elizabethan period. Metaphysical poetry is notable for its use of psychological analysis of love, its depiction of the poet's complexity of thought, and its imagery of the disillusionment of love. The seventeenth-century poet John Donne is most often associated with metaphysical poetry. Bogan studied Donne's work carefully, and her poem "Words for Departure" contains effective images of disillusionment, as well as a psychological analysis of what went wrong in the love affair.

Narrative Poetry

A narrative poem is a poem that tells a story or recounts events. Bogan's poem tells the story of her lover's departure from her life. However, Bogan makes this structure her own by refusing to tell the story in a straight chronological form. Instead she shifts time in her narrative and creates tension and complexity in her story. The story ends with the poet's recognition that she cannot change what is happening. Her lover will leave in spite of her words and neither her love for him nor her anger at his actions will change what is happening.

Parallelism

Paralelism is a grammatical device that conveys equal importance of two or more ideas by using the same syntax for each idea. For example, Bogan uses parallelism to describe the emptiness she feels as her lover is preparing to leave her. In line 1 she explains, "Nothing was remembered, nothing forgotten." She again repeats this structure in line 6 with "Nothing was accepted, nothing looked beyond." Bogan returns to this structure in line 14 with "Nothing was lost, nothing possessed." All three lines have exactly the same structure. This use of parallelism focuses the reader's attention on these lines and on specific words and signifies that they are important elements of the poem.

Poetic Form

The word poem is generally assigned to mean a literary composition distinguished by emotion, imagination, and meaning. But the term poem may also fit certain designated formulas, such as a sonnet or a sestina, which are defined by a specific length and/or a particular rhyme scheme. A poem may also include divisions into stanzas, a sort of paragraph-like division of ideas, and may also include a specific number of stressed or unstressed syllables in each line. Bogan's poem is divided into separate sections, with each section also divided into stanzas of varying lengths. Every word in Bogan's poem suggests an image or idea, and nothing is wasted. Modern poetry has moved away from the strict formulas used by early poets, but even contemporary poets still strive for an impassioned response to their poems. Bogan studied the Renaissance lyric poets, and she is able to make effective use of traditional poetic forms.