Poetry compresses ideas and emotions, so poets generally use more literary techniques than novelists do. In addition to choices in diction, detail, figurative language, and imagery, poets use rhyme, meter, form, sound, and special poetic syntax to serve their purpose. Consider the choices Paulette Jiles makes in her poem “Paper Matches.”
Paper Matches
Paulette Jiles
My aunts washed dishes while the uncles
squirted each other on the lawn with
garden hoses. Why are we in here,
I said, and they are out there?
5
That’s the way it is,
said Aunt Hetty, the shriveled-up one.
I have the rages that small animals have,
being small, being animal.
Written on me was a message,
10
“At Your Service,”
like a book of paper matches.
One by one we were taken out
and struck.
We come bearing supper,
15
our heads on fire.
(1988)
Jiles sets the scene with a description of the aunts washing dishes and the uncles fooling around outdoors. In the first line, Jiles uses enjambment, a form of poetic syntax in which a line ends without a pause and must continue to the next line to complete its meaning. The speaker’s aunts and uncles appear in the indented first line, but the uncles break free in line 2, pushing out toward the left margin. Jiles omits quotation marks or a question mark in the short conversation between the speaker and her aunt in lines 3–6, even burying the “I said” in the middle of the speaker’s question in lines 3–4. Aunt Hetty’s reply, also without quotation marks, is as brief and as defeated as the description of Aunt Hetty herself—“the shriveled-up one” (l. 6). The omitted punctuation reinforces the mousey subservience and threadbare quality of the speaker and her aunts; their conversation is in undertones, afraid to be noticed. The speaker has a small burst of anger and rebellion, but her rage is the rage of “small animals”—futile. The poem has a shift in line 9, as the speaker subsides into passivity, signaled by the use of the passive voice: the message is “written on” her. The simile in line 11 compares the women to a book of paper matches—used up one by one. The passive voice continues as the women, now “paper matches,” are “taken out / and struck” (ll. 12–13). There is a suggestion of physical abuse in the word “struck” as well. The last two lines of the poem paint a vivid and provocative image: women “bearing supper,” their “heads on fire.” In spite of their lowly stature, there is something fierce and angry about the women in that image. You can see the way Jiles’s diction and syntax choices extend the poem’s feminist theme and agenda.