"Difference"

In this poem Mark Doty chooses to use an unrhyming tercet style, or a poem consisting of 3 lines per stanza. Doty does use alliteration, which he uses to emphasize words helping me to understand the poem. At first I didn't understand why he wrote a poem about jellyfish but after reading the poem again I noticed that he compared adjectives used to describe jellyfish to parts of speech specifically "like" and "as". Doty also makes a reference to a classic dancer Isadora Duncan. Doty also uses consonance mildly. The alliteration in the 10th stanza really helped meto understand what Doty was trying to say. When Doty writes "..forming itself into figures than refiguring" its easy to think initially that he is simply writing about jellyfish, but he is actually comparing the ability of a jellyfish to reconfigure, to the way that we can change words in different situations to mean different things, both positive and negative. Without the repetition its possible that I would have overlooked the whole idea of him comparing jellyfish to language. Doty also uses a Caesura before alluding to Isadora Duncan, which further emphasizes his point that jellyfish, and words can be changed. I really enjoyed this poem because it showed how affective repition can be, and it made a very strong point about the words that we choose to use.