Elegy for the Native Guards

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2007

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form and Meter

Trethewey’s poem is, as indicated by the title, an elegy: a poem of “loss or mourning” (397), according to the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. It has 24 lines broken into four, six-lined stanzas called sexains. The poem’s meter is generally iambic pentameter (10 syllables per line that follow an unstressed-stressed pattern), but has significant breaks in this meter, so the form reflects the content.

Trethewey uses two rhyme schemes: one for the first three stanzas, and one for the final (fourth) stanza. The first three stanzas have the rhyme scheme ABCCBA. This is considered an envelope, or enclosed, rhyme scheme. The final stanza follows the rhyme scheme AAABBB, which is a more open type of rhyme scheme. Moving from a closed rhyme scheme to a more open one reflects the content of Trethewey’s poem. She writes to bring forgotten, or "enclosed," history to light, and to continue sharing knowledge about Black history in the future (more openness about the past).

Alliteration and Consonance

Trethewey also makes use of alliteration: the repetition of initial (or first) letters of words. For instance, in Lines 11 and 12, the letters "c" and "s" are repeated: “shows us casements, cannons, the store that sells / souvenirs, tokens of history long buried.” This passage also employs the consonance--the repetition of consonants that do not appear at the beginning of words. The "s" also appears at the end of words: “shows us casements, cannons, the store that sells / souvenirs, tokens of history long buried.” (Lines 11-12). The letter "s" is a sibilant, meaning it has a snake-like, or hissing, sound created with the tongue against the teeth.

Em- and En-Dashes

Trethewey also uses of em-dashes, which are (in one case) used to set off superfluous but tangential information within a sentence. Some of these dashes appear in sets of two and enclose additional information about the word or phrase preceding them. For instance, "gulls overhead / trailing the boat--streamers, noisy fanfare-- / all the way to Ship Island" (Lines 1-3). In this case, the em dash offsets a description about the birds which is not necessary, but adds imagery to the poem. In a second inner-sentence examples, Trethewey writes, “the elements—wind, rain—God’s deliberate eye” (Line 24). Here, wind and rain are exemplary of the elements. Though this offset inclusion is not required, Trethewey uses it to provide a more tangible example to the reader.

The other kind of em-dashes that appear in the poem are at the end of lines, or are not part of a pair. For example, Trethewey writes, “all the crude headstones— / water-lost” (Lines 19-20). Line 19 ends with an em-dash and indicates that the following information is what happened to the objects listed before the em-dash. It functions almost as a "to be" verb, such as "are" (as in, the headstones are water-lost). This style of use of em-dashes also serves a metrical purpose. The pause associated with the use of an em-dash puts stress on the last spoken syllable, allowing monosyllabic words to receive a stress in the middle of a line where they otherwise would not. This technique is especially common in Emily Dickinson's poetry, whose slant rhymes and loose meter were given additional structure with em-dashes.

Trethewey also used the en-dash or hyphen in “water-lost” (Line 20) This shorter punctuation mark is seen in other literary devices, like kennings, which are a type of compound word formed for poetic expression. The epic Old English poem Beowulf notoriously used kennings like "battle-sweat" and "whale-path." Many poets employ kennings as a creative means of describing an everyday object or idea.