Behind the Motel

The first thing you notice about the poem is that there are three people a man, woman, and child. Secondly, they are at a motel. These two things are contradictory because you don’t connect these people with being at a motel. They are all doing something different. This creates a very gloomy and somber mood for the poem. There is no logical or commonsensible reason to be at a motel. You notice the words cloth, bare, mirror, mist, and drawer because they are repeated at the end of every line in every stanza. One strange word that is repeated in every stanza also is “hemlock”, which is a highly poisonous plant. The repeated words at the end of each line have different connotations in the following lines. Repetition is writing strategy used to emphasize and put effect on the word being used. The line rhythm for this poem is short and choppy, it’s in fragments. The poem follows the same pattern for its line rhythm from beginning to end. The punctuation is also odd, there is only one period and it is in the first stanza. The repeated use of the word “hemlock” shows the danger involved with the three people in the poem. The speaker leaves out a couple key things in their poem. They don’t tell you or give any hints about why they are at a motel, or how they got there. Another important factor missing is if these three people are related or just all happen to be at the motel together. The speaker never tells you who the woman is talking to, or what their conversation is about. The speaker makes the readers think that something bad and unfortunate has happened to the three people involved. There are several facts that help support this, the first and obvious one is them being at a motel. The man is fixing a car, the child is playing with a torn cloth, and the woman was talking on the phone then just put it in the drawer and closed it. The word “mist” is used over and over to form a caliginous image. The speaker is talking in third person and does not appear to be omniscient. They are only speaking on what both the person