"The Story We Know" Literary Terms

Villanelle

"The Story We Know" is a villanelle, a poetic form consisting of 19 lines (five tercets and one quattrain). A villanelle has only two rhyme sounds, and the first and third lines of the first stanza ("Hello," "know") are rhyming refrains that alternate as the third line in each successive stanza and form a couplet at the close.

Audience

Martha Collins writes "The Story We Know" for an audience who she believes drift through relationships without establishing true bonds.

Capitalization

"Hello" and "Goodbye" are capitalized each time they are used in order to emphasize their importance.

The first word, "But," of stanza 5 is capitalized in order to emphasize Collins's shift in tone (15). In this stanza, the poem becomes much more emotional. Collins capitalized "But" in order to emphasize this stanza's departure from the continuity of the first four stanzas.

Cataloguing

"An omelette, salad, chilled white wine?" (5)

"coffee, the Times, a slow day by the fire, dinner at eight or nine" (7-8)

Cataloging emphasizes the monotony of day-to-day lives.

Connotation

"snow begins to whiten the air" connotes the passing of time (13-4)

Diction

"cold white sign" (17)

In stanza four, Collins includes such words as "page," "picture," "words," and "lines" in order to further associate "The Story We Know" with a story in a book (12-13).

Enjambment

Stanzas two, three, four, and six are each enjambed in order to emphasize the belief of the continuity of life. The beginning words of these stanzas are not capitalized in order to emphasize this continuity.

Parallelism

"Your hand, your name" (2)

Purpose

The purpose of this poem is to demonstrate Martha Collins's beliefs in both the cyclical nature of life and death and the monotony of day-to-day life.

Symbol

In "The Story We Know", the concepts of Hello and Goodbye are symbols for birth and death. T

Repetition

Forms of "the way to begin is always the same Hello" and "Good-bye is the end" are repeated throughout the poem in order to emphasize the unavoidability of the cyclical nature of life and death.

"Hello, Hello" (1-2)

"We know, we know." (19) This repetition emphasizes the fact that the finality of death is an unaviodable fact.

Rhetorical Question

"That's ever story we know, and why pretend?" is included in order to bring emphasis to the concept that each story begins with Hello and ends with Goodbye. (4-5)

Tone

"The Story We Know" begins with a cynical tone as Collins describes the monotony of life. However, in the fifth stanza, a tone shift occurs and the tone becomes more emotional and therefore melancholy.