Ballad

Sanchez’s poem is influenced by the ballad form with its use of a few quatrains, or four-line stanzas, telling a story that repeats its main premise throughout the poem.

In the first stanza, it becomes apparent that the speaker is addressing someone else. The older speaker wants to laugh at the younger person’s confidence in love; the slightly mocking tone comes from the speaker’s experience. In the final two lines of this stanza, the speaker acknowledges the age difference and how both of them, young and old, cannot “learn of love” (Line 4). This serves as the refrain of the poem. This first stanza also introduces the lowercase style at the start of each line and in the first-person “i,” establishing a casual conversational style.

The second stanza uses visual imagery and figurative language to describe the potency of love. The first description is a direct comparison, or metaphor, between “rain exploding” (Line 5) and love, bringing forth the mental image of rain as fireworks. The second description involves the personification, or the attribution of human qualities to inanimate things, of grass, suggesting that “her / green wax is love” (Lines 7-8). The final image is another comparison between “stones remembering / past steps” (Lines 9-10) and love, incorporating the personification of the stones. At the end of this stanza, the speaker tweaks the order of the refrain but keeps the sentiment the same with the inability to love at both a younger and an older age.

In the third stanza, the speaker becomes nostalgic, reminiscing about a particular time she “knew / of love” (Lines 15-16). She maintains her distance from this past event, emphasizing that it only happened “once” (Line 14) and that she does not remember when it happened or with whom it happened. The speaker goes on to speak of a sexual encounter that removed “all trace” of her (Line 20). This stanza does not include the repeated phrase found in the first two stanzas.

The fourth and final stanza mimics the first stanza with some alterations. This time, the speaker smiles rather than laughs at the other person, who is identified this time as a “young heiress of a naked dream” (Line 23), suggesting the young woman’s passionate desires are similar to the speaker’s once-held yearnings. Despite what has transpired over the course of the poem, the speaker does not change her stance. The final two lines repeat the phrase that the speaker is too old and her listener too young “to learn of love” (Line 25).