"The Wife of the Man of Many Wiles" is written in tetrameter, the majority of the lines beginning 
with an amphibrach. Ms. Stallings wrote that she "liked the feel of the lilting rhythm, which seemed 
part of the voice." Stallings also states in both email interview and the interview with the Cortland 
Review that she did not conciously write in a specific meter, but that it emerged as the poem progressed.
While this accounts for some of the deviations, like the pentametric line 15, the meter with all its nuances gives 
a specific voice to Penelope and an equally specific tone to the poem. Molly Peacock writes in How to Read 
a Poem...and Start a Poetry Circle that "[e]ven a free verse poem that doesn't have a regular rhythm or an 
obvious rhyme scheme still has the baseline bones of music" (20). Stalling's poetry, therefore, is positively 
melodious. Each shift from the amphibrachyl pattern marks a point where Penelope's emotions, hidden by 
careful indifference in the beginning of the poem,peek through. The imagery in line 3, "hip-deep in blood, knee-
deep in goddesses" marks the first change. Penelope uses hyperbole flippantly, but the shift from the "lilting"
 amphibrachs to the more solemn dactyls, traditionally used as the building blocks of epic poetry, indicate that  
she feels more strongly about both thedanger Ulysses faced and his abandonment of her for more divine partners. 
Line 6, composed completely of amphibrachs, demonstrates her more successful use of irony. Similarly, she 
maintains composure when speaking of the stories Ulysses told her upon his return in line 14, but begins to 
break when she expands to include at what price he returned in line 15. In line 14, the amphibrachyc structure 
stresses both 'you' and 'me'. This emphasisesthat Penelope and Ulysses find themselves in the same condition, 
that Penelope might be feeding Ulysses the same type of stories, and that she might have been as unfaithful as he. 
Line 16 begins with amphibrachs, but thetrochee in the third foot betrays Penelope as clearly as if her voice had 
cracked, and signifies a major tone shift. Up until this point, she tries to be scornful and apathetic, but in the final 
stanza the extent of her resentment toward Ulysses for both abandoning and betraying her comes through as she 
voices her pent-up desire to believe him. However,their dual disloyalty makes it impossible for her to do so. 
She therefore, with the caesura separating her interior feelings from her cooler exterior, shrugs off his gallant 
defense of their home. Despite her words, there are no lilting amphibrachsin the final line, and the poem ends 
with a monosyllabic foot that reveals the extent of her injuries. The final syllable is unstressed and therefore 
constitutes a feminine ending, which is appropriate for the speaker and for the tone.