“A Stone is Nobody’s” Russell Edson
Prompt 3. Pay attention to the way the lines are constructed in the poem. How does the use of enjambment, line length, end-stops, caesuras, meter or syllabics, and/or rhyme work to enhance or enact meaning in the poem?
The poem “A Stone is Nobody’s” is a clear example of prose poetry. It is not written in verse, there is no formal line structure but it does contain rhythm and metaphors and seems to contain a spoken play nature about it. At the surface of the poem, there is the back and forth between a man and his mother, discussing a stone that he made prisoner. The lines, lacking formality, seem to rely solely on different pieces to a tiny store, almost as if the author is creating a little piece of fable or fiction. The first stanza contains three lines, short sentences that often contain fragments, describing what this man has done to this stone. It contains plenty of punctuation as if drawing from the actions each sentence describes; very closed ended and commanding. The next stanza contains one sentence, with a question but no quotation marks. In fact, the author doesn’t use quotation marks for any of the dialogue throughout the poem, giving it an almost unspoken quality between the two speakers. There are stanzas with more than three lines and stanzas with one or two lines always ending with end-stops. The line lengths vary but seem to flow with a back and forth rhythm, creating a story like sequence while giving it a tone of mystery because there is no formality. Because of this, I was wondering what would happen next with every line. There is no particular rhyme scheme throughout, but there are repeated words such as “captured,” “captive,” “conquered”, using consonance to drive a point home. The title itself reveals an assonance in the “o’s’ in “stone” and “no-body’s”, as if creating an echo. Enjambment is used in multiple stanzas such as stanza three when the first line is long but the second line is made of only one word, “captured” which seems to be the theme of the poem. There is also an enjambment in the next stanza in the first two lines that end in the words “know” and “stone” respectively, both creating a pseudo rhyme and also drawing attention to one of the main concrete images in the poem as well as the knowledge that the mother is bestowing upon her son. I think the author uses enjambment to create both emphasis on the words but also to keep pulling the reader in by making us wonder what the next sentence has to offer. Though there is no formal use of syllables, there is still a meter throughout, that once again, creates that fable tone that the author seems fond of.
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