18 pages • 36-minute read
Declaration
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Literary Devices
Form & Meter
“Declaration” is a short lyric poem written in free verse. A free verse poem has no rhyme scheme or planned meter. It is a found poem based on a document written in prose: the “Declaration of Independence.” As such, the language is prosaic in a literal sense. The fragments work together to create poetic resonance and sound through repetition.
“Declaration” is also a blackout or erasure poem. An erasure poem is a type of found poetry where the poet takes another piece of writing and consciously removes words from the original text. By doing so, the poet creates a new work in conversation with the original work and its author. Smith applies this blackout method to respond to the hypocrisy and omissions in the famous “Declaration.” Now, the founding fathers’ careful language disappears into blank space, replaced by the words Smith finds necessary. This erasure poem redirects who gets erased in history by giving voice to the underrepresented victims of slavery.
Epistrophe & anaphora
Epistrophe is the repetition of a word or phrase at the end of a line of verse. In “Declaration,” Smith uses epistrophe to draw attention to the poem’s speakers. She ends several lines with “our–” and never actually states what these people have lost. Likewise, this repetition draws attention to the speakers. We notice that they are a body of people speaking to a figure of power. The lines that end with “our” include violent verbs like “plundered,” “ravaged,” “destroyed,” “taking,” and “altering.” Yet, the speakers never clearly say what has been taken from them. The continual repetition of “our” sounds like a shocked plea, like the speakers become speechless when asked to describe the adversity leveled against them.
Anaphora is the repetition of words or lines at the beginning of a poem. In this case, “he” starts two lines and contrasts the speakers’ “our.” “He” is the one doing violence to the speakers and is in a position of privilege and power.
Ellipses
In poetry, ellipses happens when a reader can still understand the poet’s meaning with words or phrases left out of the poem. “Declaration” uses black space and em dashes to draw attention to the ellipses. Em dashes have accompanied ellipses in poetry since Emily Dickinson used them to significant effect. These dashes punctuate the line breaks by making the person reading the poem take a longer pause to consider what the poet says with the empty space.
Much of the ellipses in the poem happen after the lines that end in epistrophe. The ellipses open up the poem for the reader to investigate what the speakers are trying to say across time and space. Because the speakers cannot tell us what happened to them, we must read between the lines. History and knowledge of American culture help fill in these blanks. Yet, the actual violence of this poem is the parts that are dashed and missing. We know what the words by the founding fathers were, but we do not have an adequate historical record of filling in what the speakers of this poem have lost.
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