A Formal Description of "Indian Death Song"

The poem “Indian Death Song” by Anne Hunter is included in the Virginia Lucas Scrapbook. This poem is composed of sixteen lines written in tetrameter, with four feet in each line. About half of the lines in the poem appear with one iamb followed by three anapests. The other half are made up of four consecutive anapests. The last line of each stanza is always pure anapestic meter. The strict combination of these metrical lines without variation means that the poem is also written in pure meter. The only exception to these patterns is one spondee followed by three anapests in the second to last line of the poem. The poem is written in end-stopped lines with punctuation at the end of every line. In “Indian Death Song,” there is alliteration of the “s” sound in the first line in the words “sun,” “sets,” and “stars.” There is also alliteration of the “r” sounds in the second line in the words “glory,” “remains” and “their.” Many of the lines in “Indian Death Song” include assonance, and these repeated vowel sounds set the tone of the poem. One example of vowel sounds carried throughout a line of the poem occurs in the seventh line: “Why so slow? do you wait ‘till I shrink from the pain?” In this line, the “o” sound in the words “so” and “slow” is repeated, and the “a” sound from the words “wait” and “pain” is also repeated. The entirety of “Indian Death Song” is made up of rhyming couplets. These rhymes occur in an AABB rhyme scheme with two expectations for CC and DD rhymes. Every rhyme in the poem is a masculine rhyme, with all but one occurring as true rhymes. The one exception is a slant rhyme toward the end of the poem. This rhyme happens at the end of lines 13 and 14 with the words “gone” and “son.”