Drought Year Style

Drought Year Style

"Drought Year" contains three stanzas that successively increase by one line: the first stanza has five lines; the second, six; the third, seven. The overwhelming majority of the poem's lines are in iambic tetrameter and the rhyme scheme, though necessarily different because of variances in each stanza, consists of three sets of end-rhymes: abaccin the first stanza, aabbccin the second, and aab-bcccin the third. All the poem's rhymes are of one syllable and thus "masculine." In the second stanza, b lines end with a slant rhyme. The poem has no enjambment (usually making a poem more like prose and conversation), and this gives "Drought Year" more the character of a lyric, or song-like poem, enhanced by the poem's regular meter and rhyme pattern. The dingoes' cries within the poem also help create a kind of song, like the howls of wolves and coyotes, or the wails of whales and humans—a...
(read more)