“The Lamb” by Mary Oliver
While attending the University of North Carolina Greensboro, I took Advanced Poetry and one of the things I had to do was annotate some poetry. Here is one of those poems. Enjoy.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/mary-oliver
“The Lamb” is just a standard poem with three stanzas with no rhyme scheme or particular line pattern. However, one can say there is a slight pattern to the poem where “I” is concerned. In the first stanza, there are at least six “I”s and five of them begin a sentence. It makes sense that since this is the beginning of the poem and the reader can get a feel for the reader early on. What these “I”s do for the poem is identity who the speaker is, as previously stated, as well as define the tone of the poem with every statement the speaker makes. These “I” statements also help the reader know what the poem is going to be about.
Digging deeper, we see that these statements are about things the speaker knows, who the speaker is and what the speaker has done. This gives the reader more of an idea of the speaker of the poem and makes the speaker seem more real as a character and not just some omniscient voice narrating a poem.
In the next stanza, the speaker begins describing the life they lead. Here, we have fewer “I”s, thus fewer statements, giving the poem more a narrative feel but the speaker is still involved, not having morphed into an omniscient presence. Also, there are fewer lines in this stanza, giving this stanza less of a rant than the first stanza. Here the speaker is trying to give the reader more of feel for who he/she is without telling the reader who he/she is. The tone does not shift though. The speaker may be taking on more of a narrative approach but the tone is still reminiscent.
In the last stanza, the “I”s are more present than the last but they do not begin sentences and in a way, give less of a feel of statements. True, the speaker is still stating things but he/she is more likely recanting things. Here the speaker is not saying what they knew, what they did or even who they were but recalling how they felt. Thus the tone of the poem shifts from reminiscing or telling a story to remorsefulness and regret.
