Short Poem Analysis

Tony Miller
English 210, Literature and Writing
January 31, 2011

The first thing that strikes me about Davis’s “Building Walls” is its blocking on the page. An example stanza looks like this:

Rusted wheelbarrow carries what will be today’s last load,
and together, where our field ends and the world begins,
we touch,
     shoulder to shoulder,
     fitting stone upon stone.

The indent of the last two lines evokes the staggered pattern of bricks in a wall, where the joint between two members of one row is bridged by one member of the next.
There are other functions of the structure I notice as well. The poem consists of four stanzas, each with five lines of varying lengths in free verse. To a relatively untrained ear, it sounds less like classical poetry and Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter than Jim McKay waxing poetic about the thrill of victory with only his voice to carry through the airwaves. This distinction is also eminent in the vocabulary; the poem needs no translation to layman’s terms as it is already in them written, just as it would be heard in a normal, narrative fashion. “Walls” could be construed as slightly sibilant, counting a dozen or more “s” sounds among its score of lines, but without looking up the data it cannot be noted whether these sounds are unusually prevalent here. The poem seems also very literal – the stones are stones, no more, no less and with no other possibilities.