17 pages • 34 minutes read
Coal
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Literary Devices
Form and Meter
“Coal” is written in free verse. Lorde breaks the 26 lines into three stanzas. The second, or middle, stanza is 15 lines, slightly more than double the number of lines in the first stanza (seven). The third and final stanza contains four lines. While the 15-line stanza could resemble a sonnet (which has 14 lines) if the reader only glances at its length, that resemblance fades in the varied line lengths.
Throughout the poem, the lines vary in length from one word/syllable to lines that reach the left and right margins. The first line only contains the one-syllable pronoun “I,” and Line 12 spans almost the entire page. This gives the right-hand side of the poem a ragged edge. In this way, Lorde’s form resembles her content when she writes “ill-pulled tooth with a ragged edge” (Line 15). It also means there is no consistent meter in the poem.
Lorde also changes some line breaks between the two different published editions of “Coal.” For instance, in the version published in 1968, the second stanza begins with “Some words are open / Like a diamond on glass windows” (Lines 8-9). In the version published in 1976, Lorde changes this line break: “Some words are open like a diamond / on glass windows” (Lines 8-9). Moving the break after "diamond" emphasizes the second repetition of that word.
Repetition and Variation
Repetition is a device that Lorde uses heavily in “Coal.” Some phrases are repeated with subtle variations. For example, the word diamond is in all three stanzas. In the first and last stanza, the phrase that contains “diamond” changes only slightly: from “How a diamond comes into a knot of flame” (Line 5) to “As the diamond comes into a knot of flame” (Line 24). In the first stanza, Lorde introduces the process of becoming a gem as a kind of openness, while in the final stanza, she directly compares this process—using the comparative word “as”—with the formation of Blackness and Black identity. In the middle stanza, “diamond” is contained in a different phrase about cutting glass, which develops how it acts on the world rather than the process by which it is formed. Returning to a slightly modified version of the original phrase that contains “diamond” at the end of the poem gives this repetition a musical quality, like the sonata structure of a song (exposition, development, and recapitulation).
In contrast, other phrases are repeated exactly at the beginning of subsequent sentences. This form of repetition is called anaphora. “Some words” begins several different sentences in Lines 8, 16, and 21. This list, or catalog, of descriptions of “some words” is interrupted by contrasts that are phrased differently, such as “Others” in Line 17. Overall, “word” is the most repeated word in the poem, appearing in every stanza for a total of six times.
Simile and Metaphor
As previously mentioned in many other sections of this guide, comparisons play a large role in “Coal.” Lorde uses comparisons that contain the words “like” or “as,” which are categorized as similes. She also uses comparisons that are presented as definitions, which are categorized as metaphors. Some lines contain both similes and metaphors used in conjunction. This extensive use of comparisons is an attempt to convey something that is unfamiliar by using phrases and images that are familiar. This includes familiar phrases about coal and diamonds; familiar animal symbols; and the image of paper wagers that would have been familiar to Lorde’s contemporaries. Similes and metaphors are how Lorde frames the experience of living and speaking as a Black woman in America to people who are not Black.
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By Audre Lorde
