Speaker or Narrator, and Point of View
First-person
Form and Meter
17 lines of free verse poetry
Metaphors and Similes
Metaphor: earth as a physical receptacle for history
Alliteration and Assonance
Alliteration: "she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness," "body bombarded."
Irony
In stanzas 3-4, the poem emphasizes the irony of Curie's death at the hands of radioactive elements, the same thing that gave her power and prestige
Genre
lyric poem
Setting
Tone
melancholic, elegiac
Protagonist and Antagonist
Major Conflict
Climax
Foreshadowing
Understatement
Allusions
Allusions to Marie Curie's groundbreaking and Nobel Prize–winning research on the radioactive elements polonium and radium.
Metonymy and Synecdoche
Metonymy: the "amber bottle" stands in for earlier medical cures
Personification
In line 2, the earth is personified as having a "flank."
