Alphabet

Naomi Shihab Nye

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1998

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form & Meter

Shihab Nye consistently uses free verse—a lack of formal rhyme scheme or meter—in her poetry to strike a contemporary, confessional, and familiar tone. In “Alphabet,” she does the same, using short stanzas and short lines with consistent enjambment, a lack of end punctuation that allows the end of one line to flow directly into the next. The shortening and lengthening of the stanzas and the lack of punctuation for pauses emphasize the speaker’s rising panic and existential dread.

Anaphora

Writers typically use anaphora, repetition in successive clauses, when they want to emphasize content or tone. In this case, the speaker repeats “when I” as their crisis of loss builds—what starts out as the realization that “there is almost no one left / who remembers / what stood in that / brushy spot / ninety years ago” builds to images of emptiness: “the bare peach tree” (Line 27) and “rusted chairs” (Line 29). “When I” compounds the inescapability of loss as the speaker faces reminders of death everywhere they go. Here, anaphora creates a tone of grief-stricken inevitability—whether the speaker reflects upon past sights or predicts what they will see does not matter: They cannot escape the reality of their loss.

Simile and Metaphor

Consistent with Shihab Nye’s other work, this poem uses simile and metaphor to build the poem’s emotional undercurrent. In the first key metaphor, the speaker describes death as “going up / into the air” (Lines 4-5). Firstly, this metaphor avoids the finality of death by suggesting that the elderly are simply “going” somewhere else. Secondly, it sets the quietly eerie tone that permeates the poem’s setting, in which the speaker wanders seemingly abandoned houses as though their owners have simply disappeared.

In the poem’s key similes, the speaker compares “what will be forgotten” (Line 31) to “the sky / over our whole neighborhood” (Lines 34-35) and then to “the time my plane / circled high above our street / the roof of our house / dotting the tiniest / ‘i’” (Lines 35-39). These two similes work together to present the speaker’s internal turmoil: In the first, lost knowledge feels immense and eternal, like the sky. In the second, the perspective changing to the sky itself, the speaker’s feelings become more ambiguous. On one hand, they feel minute, aware of their own smallness in the universe—they are “the tiniest / ‘i’” (Lines 38-39). On the other, knowledge of their neighborhood and home give the house identity and make it recognizable to the speaker, even from such a height. Together, these similes emphasize the importance of home and communal identity, which ultimately ground people and give their lives meaning.