Amends Literary Elements

The speaker is unidentified: not only are their gender and age unknown, but it is not even clear whether the speaker is intended to be a human being or some other kind of presence. The point of view strongly hints at a feminine perspective, however, and is equipped with attributes of omniscience.

Comprised of four quatrains lacking rhyme, the poem is an example of free verse adhering neither to a fixed meter nor to a standard form.

The poem's personification of the moonlight relies on a number of humanizing metaphors for the way light moves across objects. For example, the light "lay[s] its cheek...on the sand," "licks the broken ledge," and "leans across the hangared fuselage." Rich also metaphorically compares the mine to a wound when she describes it as a "gash."

Assonance: the /i/ sound is repeated throughout the second stanza in the words "picks," "flicks," "licks," and "cliffs."

The poem is set in an indefinite time and place characterized by proximity to a beach with cliffs, large swaths of agricultural properties raising crops, a quarry, railroad tracks and a trailer park.

The poem's tone is unsatisfied and angry about the violence done to people and the land, but also admiring of the beauty of the moonlight, and gentle towards the sleeping people.

Protagonist: The moonlight. Antagonist: Those who run industrial farms and mine the land.

The conflict is an abstract one, between justice and injustice, the beauty of the world and the violence inflicted on it and its people.

The poem's climax occurs in the final line of the last stanza, where the presence of injustice is made most explicit through the phrase "as if to make amends," a phrase which simultaneously acknowledges that the moon can do nothing to really reduce the injustice of the world.

The opening words of the poem, “Night like this” in connection to the presence of bright moonlight is an allusion to Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, in which the two lovers, Lorenzo and Jessica, exchange a series of jokes, each beginning with the phrase "On a night like this."

The moon throughout the poem is personified, largely by taking human actions like "laying its cheek" or "lean[ing] across the hangared fuselage."

“Aa white star…exploding out of the bark” is a hyperbolic description of the simple reflection of the light of the sun reflecting off the moon reflecting off the tree.

A kind of onomatopoeia is established in the description of quarry in the third stanza with the descriptive harshness of the term “gash.”