Elegy for the Native Guards

Trethewey’s poem is, as indicated by the title, an elegy: a poem of “loss or mourning” (397), according to the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. It has 24 lines broken into four, six-lined stanzas called sexains. The poem’s meter is generally iambic pentameter (10 syllables per line that follow an unstressed-stressed pattern), but has significant breaks in this meter, so the form reflects the content.

Trethewey uses two rhyme schemes: one for the first three stanzas, and one for the final (fourth) stanza. The first three stanzas have the rhyme scheme ABCCBA. This is considered an envelope, or enclosed, rhyme scheme. The final stanza follows the rhyme scheme AAABBB, which is a more open type of rhyme scheme. Moving from a closed rhyme scheme to a more open one reflects the content of Trethewey’s poem. She writes to bring forgotten, or "enclosed," history to light, and to continue sharing knowledge about Black history in the future (more openness about the past).

Trethewey also makes use of alliteration: the repetition of initial (or first) letters of words. For instance, in Lines 11 and 12, the letters "c" and "s" are repeated: “shows us casements, cannons, the store that sells / souvenirs, tokens of history long buried.