This Is a Photograph of Me

“This is a Photograph of Me,” a lyric poem with narrative elements, uses an open form. The stanzas and the meter are uneven, with each line differing in the amount of syllables. 

The poem uses internal rhyme—that is, placed in the middle of lines. The rhymes are typically slant rhymes—words that have several rhyming sounds in common, but do not fully rhyme, such as “in the left-hand corner / a thing like a branch” (Lines 7-8), or, “The photograph was taken / the day after I drowned. // I am in the lake” (Lines 15-17). 

The poem relies on enjambment (a line moving right into the next without a grammatical or punctuated pause) to build emotional momentum. Another prominent organizational technique is the volta, or a dramatic turn of ideas that is typically used in highly formal poetic forms like the sonnet. Here, a discussion of a seemingly bucolic landscape photograph is undercut by a parenthetical aside that reveals a drowned body “just under the surface” (Line 18) of a lake. This gives the poem circularity, in keeping with the theme of the collection it appears in, The Circle Game.