19 pages • 38 minutes read
Wingfoot Lake
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Literary Devices
Form and Meter
“Wingfoot Lake” consists of five free-verse stanzas with only slightly varied line length. The first stanza has seven lines, the second through fourth have eight lines, and the poem’s final stanza has only six lines. The stanza’s similar lengths—particularly in the middle three stanzas—provide a feeling of structure and stability like that of more traditional poetic forms. This structure, provided by the stanza length, is reinforced by how the poem orients each stanza around a particular image or scene, similar to how a prose paragraph focuses on one idea. The first stanza, for instance, focuses on Beulah’s experience at the pool, while the second stanza focuses on the picnic.
The stanza’s focus becomes a bit derailed, however, at the end of the second stanza. Dove uses enjambment in Line 15, or the last line of the second stanza, so that it continues into the third stanza. While each stanza is still focused on one idea, those ideas begin to bleed into one another in the third, fourth, and fifth stanzas using this same enjambment technique. The stanzas bleed together at roughly the same rate as the gap between Beulah and the speaker narrows—and perhaps even closes—by the last two stanzas through the use of free indirect discourse.
Juxtaposition
Because Dove orients each stanza around a particular scene or idea, reading them in order creates a series of juxtapositions. The poem, then, unfolds as a montage of these images rather than as a linear narrative. This means that understanding the poem relies heavily on the reader’s ability to draw connections between the scenes as they appear in order.
The connection between the first stanza’s racially segregated pool and the second stanza’s picnic is not made explicit through the speaker’s syntax, diction, or grammar. The only connection between them, in isolation, is between the “white families” (Line 10) at the picnic and the “white arms” (Line 4) at the pool. The association between the two scenes, and the suggestion that they depict similar instances of segregation, is verified by their proximity to one another in the poem.
Dove’s juxtapositions are particularly powerful insofar as they allow the reader to fill the space between the poem’s scenes with their own interpretations. In this way, the poem does not make moral claims about Beulah’s experience but merely presents scenes from it and allows the reader to draw their own conclusions.
Free Indirect Discourse
Free indirect discourse is a novelistic technique that infrequently appears in poetry. In a third-person narrative, it can be difficult for the narrator—or in poetry’s case, the speaker—to depict characters’ inner lives. Free indirect discourse occurs when these characters speak and communicate their inner lives directly, despite the distance between them and the speaker.
Free indirect discourse can be identified either by a shift in the speaker’s tone or diction, or by the speaker being privy to information about the character’s thought process. The technique is most clearly seen in Line 26, when Beulah considers what Joanna “know[s] about Africa?” (Line 26) and whether there are “lakes like this one” (Line 27).
Though free indirect discourse clarifies a character’s thoughts and motivations, it is difficult to differentiate speaker and subject. In “Wingfoot Lake,” Beulah’s voice comes through particularly strong in the final two stanzas, but it also appears earlier. The speaker’s characterization of being “dragg[ed]” (Line 9) to the picnic and idiosyncratic phrases, such as “young horses eyeing the track” (Line 18), are other instances of Beulah’s thoughts and vocabulary coming through the speaker.
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By Rita Dove
