Robert Pinsky: Poems Literary Elements

The poem 'Creole' is written from the first person point of view and seems to be an autobiographical memory, as the speaker relates 'I was seven years old, my sister was two.'

'City Elegies' is written in six parts. Part I. The Day Dreamers is written as four un-rhymed quatrains. Part II. "Everywhere I Go, There I Am" is written in the same form. Part III. House Hour is written in five irregular stanzas. Part IV. Street Music is written in three regular 10-line stanzas. Part V. Soot is written as one long stanza in blank verse. Part VI. The Tuning is written in six regular tercets.

In 'Antique,' Pinsky uses the hyperbolic metaphor 'I drowned in the fire of having you, I burned / In the river of not having you,' to present the feelings of loss and of time passing.

The assonance of 'Someday far down that corridor of horror' in the poem 'Antique' presents the corridor stretching out in front of the reader.

The lines 'Optician comes from a Greek word that has to do with seeing. Banker comes from an Italian word for a bench, where people sat, / I imagine, and made loans or change,' in the poem 'Creole,' is somewhat ironic because the enjambment conceals the extra information within the next stanza, what they do on the bench, making the suggestion that banker is simply to do with bench, (whilst optician is logically derived) seem surprising and against the image of a banking career.

'Creole' is an autobiographical poem in a sense, having memories written within it.

Part of the poem 'Shirt' is set 'at the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven.'

The tone of 'Doctor Frolic' as a poem is slightly humorous and mocking.

The protagonist in 'Doctor Frolic' is the doctor himself, 'Felicity the healer,' who 'isn't young.'

In the poem 'Shirt,' the major conflict is a moral dilemma between wearing a shirt and how that shirt has made, as well as a condemnation of those using and running sweatshops, where disasters have occurred.

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The opening lines of 'Ceremony,' 'At the end of the story, / When the plague has arrived, / The performance can begin,' foreshadows the narrative of the poem and 'chanting,' at the end.

The simile 'As if he were helping them up / To enter a streetcar, and not eternity,' is an understatement in the poem 'Creole,' because it gently implies the people are dying.

In the poem 'Embassy Architecture,' Pinsky alludes to 'dead Bacchus, Antony, Malcolm X.'

In the poem 'Shirt,' the shirt itself with 'lapped seams' and 'nearly invisible stitches along the collar,' becomes representative of 'a sweatshop' production line and cheap labor.

In 'Embassy Architecture,' Pinsky personifies 'the clean-shaven wall,' giving it dialogue and a voice to say 'To die undoing the world's way/ [...] also is the world's way, / And to deny me becomes mine.'

The line 'preventative of impotence and goitre,' in 'Doctor Frolic' is hyperbole, since the 'live mussels,' don't cure such issues, yet it implies Doctor Frolic suggests this to others or believes it himself.

The line 'Nights, outside / The tent the woods clatter,' in 'The View From The Road,' is onomatopoeic as the verb 'clatter,' evokes the unknown noise that is heard.