Alphabet

Shihab Nye consistently uses free verse—a lack of formal rhyme scheme or meter—in her poetry to strike a contemporary, confessional, and familiar tone. In “Alphabet,” she does the same, using short stanzas and short lines with consistent enjambment, a lack of end punctuation that allows the end of one line to flow directly into the next. The shortening and lengthening of the stanzas and the lack of punctuation for pauses emphasize the speaker’s rising panic and existential dread.

Writers typically use anaphora, repetition in successive clauses, when they want to emphasize content or tone. In this case, the speaker repeats “when I” as their crisis of loss builds—what starts out as the realization that “there is almost no one left / who remembers / what stood in that / brushy spot / ninety years ago” builds to images of emptiness: “the bare peach tree” (Line 27) and “rusted chairs” (Line 29). “When I” compounds the inescapability of loss as the speaker faces reminders of death everywhere they go. Here, anaphora creates a tone of grief-stricken inevitability—whether the speaker reflects upon past sights or predicts what they will see does not matter: They cannot escape the reality of their loss.