Week #8—Sign Inventory for Dan Alberghotti’s “Song of the Gods”

 Narrative style, monological tone

Unrhymed couplets (13)

Some enjambment

First person plural voice adopts personae of the gods until last line when it seems to speak for the collective “they”.

Irony, in that love, war, and desire seem to act as the gods of the poem’s title from human perspective but not from the gods’ point of view.

Tone moves from a ‘heavenly’ location to an ‘earthly’ one.

Alliteration:  “live in the light” (1,26); “war as the light grows weak” (8-9); “the only song is this song” (16-17); “that light that lies across sand in silence” (20-21); “everything else” (23) “Madness, Music” (24).

Repetition of “live in the light” in first and last lines. Also: “we are not seen” (4) and “do not see” (6-7).

Recursive motif of “desire in the morning, love in the afternoon, war as the light grows weak” (7-8) changes to “[l]ove in the morning, war in the afternoon, desire as the light fades” (17-19).

Detachment from familiar through indirect reference to humans as “those” (5,15) and “they” (6,9).