In the poem “He Can Only Hold Her” I am exploring the feeling of being trapped through the experience of abuse. The narrator of this poem is a close friend of the person experiencing the abuse. The speaker’s tone attitude about this subject is one of empathy and deep concern. The poem starts out with the narrator talking about the weight of the word abuse and the reaction people have to the word. It then goes into more details about how a person experiences and copes with abuse using damaging alienation tactics. I did this to show that people who have went through abuse usually have a lot more going on than just the abuse. Victims usually downplay and don’t think about what they’re going through as abuse, and often ignore and try to convince others who raise concern that everything’s ok. Throughout this poem I use the poetic devices enjambment, endstop, and simile. Endstop is used in the lines “Replaying every time the abuser was kind,
Until the bruises feel justified.” I did this because the next lines that come after I wanted to be separated from this section, however still related to each other. Enjambment is used throughout the entirety of the poem, with the exception of the lines I just mentioned. A simile I used in this poem was with the lines “Love that was once sweet as a peach
Gentle and sweet,
Is now bitter and rotten.” I added this simile after getting the feedback that my poem was too literal. I also think this adds a layer of depth and a visual to my poem. It brings attention to the perceived good part of the relationship that the person was initially drawn into and how the “honeymoon stage” in the beginning of an abusive relationship quickly disappears and turns into the abusive stage.