Young

“Young” is a free-verse poem, having no regular meter and rhyme scheme. The poem features enjambment with sentences carrying over from one line to the next, bringing forth the collective details that make up the environment of the speaker’s childhood as well as making the poem feel like a story that the speaker is orally sharing in the moment:

a thousand doors ago

when I was a lonely kid

in a big house with four

garages and it was summer (Lines 1-4).

In particular, the ending of “four” in Line 3 leaves the reader anticipating what noun will follow in Line 4; the payoff suggests that the speaker comes from some wealth. The poem also utilizes alliteration, the repetition of initial consonant sounds, and consonance, the repetition of consonant sounds within words, which both add to the rhythm of the poem. An example of alliteration includes the soft “s” sound in “sailed on their strange stalks” (Line 16), and consonance appears in the following line with a more contrasting sound, the hard “k,” in “as the