Literary Devices
Form and Meter
“Things We Carry on the Sea” is in free verse. Free verse is a general term used to describe works of poetry that do not conform to any regular meter. Free verse is likely the most practiced form of poetry, particularly in American literature. Though poets like William Blake and the French Symbolists pioneered the form, critics most often associate the rise in free verse with American poet Walt Whitman and his 1855 collection Leaves of Grass.
Free verse is the most flexible poetic form, allowing for unique cadences and rhythmic groupings. Flexible forms also grant greater freedom of poetic expression and a more direct translation of the poet’s language. Ping’s use of this flexibility is evident in her varied line lengths. The poem’s shortest line, “And we carry our mother tongues” (Line 15), consists of four iambic feet (or four pairs of syllables with every second stressed). The poem’s longest line, Line 10, contains 20 poetic feet of varied meter. Paired with the anaphoric “[w]e carry” (Lines 1-12, 15) that opens most of the poems lines, the variable meter and line length help to place emphasis on the shorter lines. The longer lines, meanwhile, produce a sense of unpredictability and drifting reflective of the speaker’s transient state.
Repetition
Free verse poems avoid traditional forms and meters, but they are rarely disorganized. Instead, poets use organizational methods unique to each poem’s subject or theme in order to enhance the total effect. Ping organizes “Things We Carry” around repetition. The speaker repeats the phrase “[w]e carry” (Lines 1-12, 15) at the beginning of all but all but six of the poem’s lines. Two of those lines repeat “[w]e’re” (Lines 13-14) instead of “[w]e carry.” Anaphora, or the technique of opening multiple lines in succession with the same word or phrase, gives each line a sense of shared focus and continuity. Anaphora can also evoke a sense of ritual or protest, as both practices rely on repeated phrases.
Ping also uses repetition to demonstrate similarities between the different cultural backgrounds in the poem’s collective speaker. The speaker repeats the words “love” (Line 16), “peace” (Line 17), and “hope” (Line 18) in Chinese, Arabic, Yiddish, Spanish, and English, demonstrating that people of multiple cultural backgrounds share similar ideas and desire. The speaker compounds this repetition by repeating “hope, hope, hope” (Line 18) at the end of this section. The repetition of “shore . . . to shore . . . to shore” (Line 19) serves a similar function, but it highlights instead the speaker’s long search for a “shore” to immigrate to.
Asyndeton
Though “Things We Carry” contains long lines, the poem’s speaker is efficient in their use of language. Part of this efficiency comes down to their use of asyndeton. Asyndeton describes when the speaker excludes conjunctions (connective words such as for, and, but, or, so, yet). Ping’s speaker uses asyndeton sparingly. The device arises most clearly when the speaker lists the “diplomas: medicine, engineer, nurse, education, math, poetry” (Line 9) and the “railroads, plantations, laundromats, tack trucks, farms, factories” (Line 10), and other structures “built on our ancestors’ backs” (Line 10).
The device removes the sense of how individual nouns relate to one another, allowing them to exist together at once without hierarchy. The speaker, for instance, does not compare the burdens carried by the history of labor exploitation in Line 10 but legitimizes all of them. Likewise, the “mother tongues” (Line 15) in Lines 16-18 exist together without qualification.
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