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Literary Devices
Poetic Form and Structure
The poem consists of 29 lines, most of them iambic pentameters. Pentameters (Greek for “five measures”) are verses (lines of poetry) that contain five metric feet (units of poetic rhythm). In this case, each metric foot consists of two syllables, with the accent on the second syllable (as in the word “be-yond”). That kind of metric foot is called an iamb. Therefore, a verse with five iambs is an iambic pentameter. A proper iambic pentameter contains 10 syllables, and the accent falls on the second, fourth, sixth, eight, and tenth syllable.
Here is an example from the poem:
Well, yes, I said, my mother wears a dot.
I know they said “third eye” in class, but it’s not (Lines 1-2)
Most readers would accentuate the highlighted syllables. However, only the first quoted line is a real iambic pentameter. The last metric foot in the second line is not an iamb, but an anapest (a metric foot in which two unstressed syllables are followed by a stressed syllable), which makes that verse 11 syllables long. Except for a few similar variations in other lines, the poem adheres to the structure of iambic pentameters.
Slant Rhyme
The poem loosely maintains the rhyme scheme of couplets, two adjoining lines that share both the meter and the rhyme. In a poem containing a series of couplets, the rhyme scheme is aabbccdd, and so on for the length of the poem. When iambic pentameters rhyme in this manner, they constitute heroic couplets, a popular poetic form in English epic and narrative poetry. Here is a famous example from the 18th-century master of heroic couplets, Alexander Pope:
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man (From An Essay on Man, Epistle II, 1733).
The first two lines of Majmudar’s poem, quoted above, make a so-called perfect rhyme because they end with identical vowel and consonant sounds. The same is true for Lines 11 and 12, which end with “laughter” and “after.” However, most other rhymes in the poem are slant rhymes (or half rhymes), in which either the final vowels or the final consonants in the rhyming words do not fully match. For example, “it” and “at” (Lines 7 and 8) share the same final consonant, but not the preceding vowel. In contrast, “myths” and “hits” (Lines 13 and 14) have the same final vowel, but not the following consonant. In the rhyme “treasure” and “measured” (Lines 9 and 10), one word ends with a vowel and the other with a consonant. There are many similar examples throughout the poem. These slant rhymes, together with the iambic meter, give the poem its rhythm but stop short of making it sound formal like perfect rhymes would do. Instead, they contribute to the poem’s casual tone, which is appropriate because the poem reports a casual conversation between teenagers and includes some of their colloquial language.
Syntax
The poem’s conversational tone is also achieved through its syntax, the ordering of words into complete sentences. There are very few short and simple sentences in the poem that correspond to individual lines, though that happens to be the case in Line 1: “Well yes, I said, my mother wears a dot.” The sentence and the poetic line begin and end together. Much more frequently, a single sentence stretches over multiple lines and, more often than not, ends in the middle of a line. The literary device of continuing a sentence from one poetic line to the next without any punctuation is called enjambment (French for “striding over”). It helps to make verses sound like ordinary language without violating their metric structure. Lines 2-8 are a good example:
I know they said “third eye” in class, but it's not
an eye eye, not like that. It’s not some freak
third eye that opens on your forehead like
on some Chernobyl baby. What it means
is, what it’s showing is, there’s this unseen
eye, on the inside. And she’s marking it (Lines 2-8).
There are four sentences of varying length in these six lines. Two of them contain embedded clauses in the middle of the sentence, which reflect the speaker’s struggle to explain the symbolic meaning of the third eye. The final sentence is short, following a caesura (a punctuated break in the middle of the line), as he abruptly asserts his mother’s belief in the third eye, as if daring his friends to mock it. Thus, the poem’s syntax plays a part in conveying both the speaker’s state of mind and the causal context in which this exchange takes place.
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