Nineteen

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1990

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form and Meter

Alexander’s narrative poem is written in a contemporary idiom and style. Divided in three stanzas, the poem does not follow regular rhyme or meter. The stanzas are nearly equal in length, comprising eight to nine lines each. The line lengths are similar throughout the poem, which gives it a structural regularity. However, the regularity is broken up by Alexander’s use of enjambment, when sentences run into the next line. An example of this would be, “I snuck around with an older man who didn’t tell me / he was married” (Lines 3-4). Another instance occurs in Lines 10-12, when the speaker describes her lover thus: “His eyes were black. “The ladies love my / hair,” / he’d say.” Line 11, containing only the word “hair,” is the shortest line in the poem by far. Enjambment creates a syncopated beat and narrative tension.

The poet uses repetition to create a sense of rhythm, as well as to illustrate key themes. For instance, the word “white” crops up throughout the poem, most notably in the first few lines: “[A]ll there was to eat was white: / cauliflower, flounder, white sauce, white ice cream” (Lines 1-2). Repeated, the word “white” evokes an overwhelming boredom and blankness, allowing readers to identify with the speaker’s boredom in this repetition. Repetition in the poem also occurs in the form of successive similar-sounding clauses, a kind of parallel syntax. In Lines 12-14, the phrase “how to” provides an example of the parallelism:

He knew everything

about marijuana. How dry it had to be to burn,

How to crush it, sniff it

how to pick the seeds out.

The repetition and parallelism show the way the lover overwhelms the young speaker, flooding her senses. Both literary devices also evoke her youth, such as when she “asked and asked about Vietnam” (Line 18), her curiosity childlike and voyeuristic at the same time.

Imagery

The poem captures a momentous time in the speaker’s life by using vivid sensory imagery and detail. Imagery works in two ways in the poem: It helps the reader connect with the urgency of the speaker’s experience, and it shows the speaker’s youthful desire to absorb knowledge through her lover. Alexander uses imagery to recreate the speaker’s urgent perception of newfound freedom, sexual awakening, and a somewhat unhealthy but fascinating love. The poem is divided between the day realm or white realm of regular life, and the night realm of adventure and forbidden desire. Sensory details, such as when the speaker evokes blandness through white food, and sharp flavor through a description of drinking rum and coke, express these divides. The juxtaposed tastes become symbols for the speaker’s two modes of being.

The fields in which the speaker sneaks off with her lover are vividly described as “poison-ivied” (Line 6), the imagery evoking the peril present in the speaker’s adventure. Another example of sensory imagery is the lover’s “musty” (Line 10) beard, which evokes the damp, secretive world of grown-ups, to which the speaker still doesn’t have complete access. The first night with him is “thick” (Line 17), recalling the dense, complex, and heady world of early love. Thus, the speaker shows how all her senses—sight, smell, taste, and touch—were involved and overwhelmed by the newness of her experiences.

The speaker embodies a thirst for experience. She wants to learn “how each scar felt” (Line 18), referring to her lover’s scars from the Vietnam war, and “how the jungle smelled” (Line 19). The use of sensory imagery in this context highlights how the speaker wants to recreate the tactile sensations of the lover’s experience for herself.

Metaphor and Symbols

While the poet does not explicitly use metaphors in the poem, many images play a metaphorical function by suggesting a subtextual meaning. For instance, the image of white, bland food items becomes a metaphor for the speaker’s fading childhood, now boring to her; expectations of purity and virginity around her sexuality; as well as the white dominant culture around her. Similarly, the black of the lover’s eyes and the black on the speaker’s clothes function as metaphors for freedom, growing selfhood, and Black identity. Marijuana functions as a metaphor for abandonment and an evasion of reality. The lover uses it as an escape from his own memories of Vietnam. Sex has different connotations for the speaker and the lover. For the speaker, it is a metaphor for choice and coming of age. For the lover, who grabs the speaker sexually when she asks questions about Vietnam, it is a metaphor again for evasion.