Things We Carry on the Sea

“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.