Between the World and Me

The poem is in free verse, which means that it has no regular meter and does not employ rhyme. The lines are exceptionally long; all but one of them stretch over more than one typographical line, sometimes taking up three or four such lines. Wright would have been aware of the long poetic line from the poetry of Walt Whitman and American poet Carl Sandburg (1878-1967), in a poem such as “Chicago” (1916) and many others. Because the lines are so long, they are end-stopped, which means that the end of the line coincides with the end of a grammatical unit, either sentence or clause.

Alliteration is the repetition of initial consonants in nearby letters. It is the most noticeable literary device used in the poem. For example, “stony skull” (Line 10), is repeated and amplified in the final line to “stony skull staring” (Line 25). This amplification draws attention to the speaker seeing his own face “staring” (Line 10) out from the sockets of the skull.

Other examples include “stumbled suddenly” (Line 1), “torn tree” (Line 6), “black blood” (Line 7), “ground gripped” (Line 12), “hungry […] hounds” (Line 13), and “formed flesh” (Line 15).