The Forest Style

The Forest Style

Repetitive Structure

Stewart comments in an interview with Jon Thompson for the online magazine Free Verse that her poetry collection The Forest "was concerned with the relations between unconscious and conscious knowledge of the past." The comment partly explains the unusual repetitive structure of the poem. Lines appear and are then repeated in the next stanza, according to the following pattern, consistently applied throughout the poem: line 1 of each stanza is repeated in line 2 of the next stanza, and line 3 of each stanza is repeated in line 4 of the next stanza. For example, stanza 1, line 1 ("You should lie down now and remember the forest") recurs in stanza 2, line 2. Stanza 1, line 3 ("no, the truth is it is gone now") recurs, with italics for emphasis, in stanza 2, line 4. There is only one place where a significant change other than italicization occurs in...
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