Mothers

“Mothers” is written in unrhymed free verse, meaning it employs no formal or traditional meter. The poem is lineated and composed in six stanzas. Both the lines and the stanzas significantly vary in length. The speaker takes a first-person point of view, and used an informal narrative tone. Giovanni’s use of all lower-case letters provides additional intimacy with the reader. Visually, the exclusion of upper-case letters gives the text a consistent profile—no letter is bigger than another, so there is no hierarchy of phrasing.

There is almost no formal punctuation, either. The poem contains two sets of quotation marks and two colons. The reader distinguishes the beginning of a new or the continuance of an ongoing grammatical phrase through the use of line and stanza breaks, as well as line and stanza lengths. The overall effect is that the poem may be read in a whisper, or at least a soft voice, as in an intimate conversation.