"Sparkling chips of rock..."See in text(Text of the Poem)
This line offers an example of the speaker’s attentiveness to the world. The “particles” mentioned in the previous stanza become “sparkling chips of rock,” a vivid image conveyed through rich sounds. Note the consonance in particular—the repeated s, p, r, and k sounds. This is an example of language that brings us closer to the world through sound and detail, rather than cloaking it in abstract ideas.
As in many of her poems, Moore uses syllabic verse, a poetic form with a fixed or constrained number of syllables per line. In each stanza, the four lines contain five, twelve, twelve, and fifteen syllables, respectively. The first two lines of each stanza rhyme, but the last two do not. Each stanza undergoes a progression from poetic to prosaic language as the rhymes slip away and the lines lengthen. The poetic tone represents the speaker’s voice, while the prosaic tone represents that of the steamroller, the academic, the critic.
