In "Incident," Trethewey employs the traditional form of the pantoum, which repeats the second and fourth lines of one stanza as the first and third of the next. However, she does not adhere exactly to the rules of this form, eschewing them all together in one stanza and often changing phrases slightly in various places. This has the effect of shifting and readjusting their meaning in understated ways. This approach to repetition is not unique to this particular poem, but actually appears elsewhere in her work.
A prime example of this is in her sequence of sonnets, "Native Guard," which reuses the last line of one sonnet as the first line of the sonnet that follows immediately after.
The Colonel said:
an unfortunate incident; said:
their names shall deck the page of history.
Some names shall deck the page of history
as it is written on stone. Some will not.
Initially, the speaker refers to a colonel's casual dismissal of the deaths of various soldiers, offering only that their names will "deck the page of history." In the next line the speaker adjusts this line slightly, saying that only "some names shall deck the page of history." In the context of the poem, the speaker is referring to the fact that at a battle in Port Hudson, multiple soldiers' bodies were abandoned on the field of battle, unclaimed and unburied. By echoing the earlier line, Trethewey is able to show how hollow the sentiment behind it really is.
This use of repetition is also present in her poem "Myth," which employs a mirror structure where the second half of the poem is the same as the first but told in reverse. Still, this reorganizing also changes the meaning of the lines:
I was asleep while you were dying.
It's as if you slipped through some rift, a hollow
I make between my slumber and my waking,
I make between my slumber and my waking.
It's as if you slipped through some rift, a hollow.
I was asleep while you were dying.
The poem retells the myth of Orpheus, in which Orpheus travels to the underworld to rescue his lover Persephone. He fails to save her, as he does not heed Hades' warning to not turn around and look at her as they exit. He is then haunted by his mistake. In the first stanza, Orpheus appears to be recollecting his memories of his vanished lover, in a dream-like state. He reaches out for her, but she is not there. At the end, when the stanza is repeated backwards, it appears to be him concretely remembering her and the pain of her loss. When he describes her slipping "through some rift" it has a much more direct impact in this second iteration. The reversal also mirrors the journey the speaker takes ascending out of and descending into the underworld. Trethewey's meticulous use of repetition shows the way in which she can manipulate the meaning of words, even when they appear to be almost identical.
