Sometime During Eternity . . .

“Sometime During Eternity” is a lyric poem written in free verse, meaning that it has no set rhyme or meter. The poem also breaks with traditional lyrical forms in terms of its visual presentation: Instead of appearing in orderly, evenly aligned stanzas, the lines are printed in a more scattered fashion, with no line directly aligning under the line preceding it. This visual presentation gives the poem an erratic and unpredictable appearance, which is in keeping with the poem’s themes of the erratic and dynamic nature of storytelling. The large gaps created in the poem’s appearance is also suggestive of the ways in which certain pieces of information can become fragmented or even go completely missing over time.

Furthermore, the poem eschews traditional punctuation to create breathless, run-on sentences. This use of continuous thoughts from line to line without the use of end stop punctuation—a literary technique known as enjambement—creates a sense of momentum in the movement of the poem from one line to the next. The lack of punctuation also heightens the general sense of informality in the poem, which is in keeping with the speaker’s casual