Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter

“Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter” is a five-line, single stanza poem written in free verse. The line lengths and beats vary and do not employ a consistent pattern. There is no rhyme in the poem. Prior to writing Silence in the Snowy Fields—the collection in which this poem is included—Bly studied formal poetry with fixed meter and rhyme. However, he felt this was restrictive as he became more concerned with the poem’s structure rather than its feeling.

“Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter” does not lack deliberate order. Bly uses potent imagery and significant line breaks to add meaning and emphasis. He builds the reader’s understanding of his landscape with repetitive mentions of temperature and weather. The word cold is used in Lines 1 and 3, while references to snow occur in Lines 1, 2, and 4. This may not create a measured rhythm, the repetition anchors the poem. The reader zeroes in on the same images the speaker does. In this way, the reader is engaged in the action of the journey with the speaker.