Insomnia

The poem is written in free verse, meaning it has no truly fixed meter or rhyme scheme. However, the poem still utilizes some rhyme and repetition to create rhythm and flow.

Each six-line stanza contains a few end rhymes to help connect the units. The first stanza rhymes “miles” (Line 2) with “smiles” (Line 4); the second stanza rhymes “hell” (Line 8), “dwell” (Line 10), and “well” (Line 12); and the final stanza rhymes “night” (Line 14) with “right” (Lines 16) and “sea” (Line 17) with “me” (Line 18).

But more powerful than the rhymes is Bishop’s use of repetition. Throughout the poem, she repeats words, letters, and sounds to bring the poem together. For example, consider the first stanza. In these first two lines, Bishop uses alliteration, repeating the “m” sound:

The moon in the bureau mirror

looks out a million miles

In these next two lines, she repeats the “p” and “s” sounds (consonance) as well as the word “never”:

(and perhaps with pride, at herself,

but she never, never smiles)

In these last two lines, she repeats the word “sleep.”

far and away beyond sleep, or

perhaps she's a daytime sleeper.

She uses repetition in an even stronger way in the third stanza when she repeats “where” (Lines 14, 15, 16, 17) four times at the beginning of lines (epistrophe is the repetition of words at the beginnings of neighboring clauses). But it is her inversion of this repetition in the last line that creates the poem’s most powerful moment. Instead of ending the poem with “where you love me,” she replaces “where” with “and” (Line 18) to add a final bit of emphasis by changing the cadence. This highlights the last line, creating a jarring transition that echoes the jarring confession of that line.