18 pages • 36 minutes read
Robert PinskyThe Street
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Free Verse
Pinsky’s poem is written in free verse, a form of poetry that is meant to mimic more typical speech and does not follow a strict rhyme scheme. Using free verse creates the feeling the speaker is talking directly to the reader in a way that is more accessible and casual.
“The Street” relates an anecdote about the speaker’s experience watching a stranger’s story unfold in a public space. The free-verse poem, like the unfolding of the event itself, makes a private moment public. The casual and direct language makes it easy to witness and understand.
Pinsky’s work and philosophy of poetry emphasizes the importance of poetry as a communal mode of communication that can bind everyday people together. The use of free verse in “The Street,” and in Pinsky's other poems, emphasizes the communal nature of the experience the speaker describes and the importance of sharing those experiences with others who share a language and common history.
Sound Devices
“The Street” does not contain end rhymes, but it is full of more subtle literary devices, such as alliteration, assonance, and consonance. Alliteration is the use of repeated letters at the beginning of words, such as in “All night / Wainwrights and upholsterers work finishing / The wheeled coffin” (Lines 4-6); Pinsky repeats the “w” three times.
Consonance is the repetition of consonants in a phrase, regardless of where they appear. The poem opens with the use of consonance in the phrase “Streaked and fretted with effort” (Line 1), using the “t” sound for a staccato effect. Assonance is the same as consonance, but with the repetition of vowel sounds, as in “stiff lids” (Line 10). These devices create a musicality that gives the poem a harmonious sound. It is easier and more pleasurable to speak the poem out loud, and the phrases become more memorable because of their subtle slant rhymes.
Line Break
The speaker compares the street of the emperor, preparing for the funeral of his "favorite" (Line 7) child, to a tragedy that occurred on his own street. He generalizes about life on that street in the following passage:
On mine,
Rockwell Avenue, it was embarrassing:
Trouble—fights, the police, sickness—
Seemed never to come
For anyone when they were fully dressed (Lines 15-19).
The line break in this anecdote is significant because it initially creates a false impression. If the line stops at “seemed never to come” (Line 18), the sentence means that trouble stays away from his street. However, the line continues with “for anyone when they were fully dressed” (Line 19). This reverses the meaning. Instead of suggesting that the people on his street are free of trouble, the speaker exacerbates the sense of humiliation they endure when trouble arrives. It emphasizes that trouble not only comes, but it happens when people are least prepared for it.
