Some Afternoons She Does Not Pick Up the Phone

Carson’s 10-line lyric poem is written in unrhymed verse and does not follow a regular meter. There is a somewhat formal arrangement in the line lengths, with the longest lines bookending the poem and the shortest line falling somewhere in the middle. The poem’s opening line, “It is February. Ice is general. One notices different degrees of ice,” is repeated at the end, which is an example of repetition.

One of the unique features of the poem is that all the lines are end-stopped; Carson avoids enjambment, or the spilling over of a clause into the next line. Each line is complete and isolated from the other, conveying the sense of being snowed-in, toward which the poem is building. Spoken aloud, the end-stopped lines also convey a dispassionate, almost-sardonic tone, trying to reign in great agitation and emotion. A line as observational as “ice is general” (Line 1), for instance, belies the helplessness the speaker feels at a frozen world that has engulfed her. Through belying the despair, paradoxically, the line amplifies it.

The poem uses more repetition as well as