Praise Song for My Mother Literary Elements

This poem is written from the first-person singular perspective by an unidentified speaker that can reasonably be assumed to be Nichols herself.

Three tercets followed by one quatrain and a single-line stanza; meter is free verse

Metaphor:

Metaphor is the primary literary device employed in the poem. There are seven overall (water, moon's eye, sunrise, fish's red gill, flame tree's spread, crab's leg, fried plantain smell), all of which are used to characterize different aspects of the speaker's mother.

Praise Song

Each of the metaphors that constitute the poem could be considered hyperbolic descriptions of the speaker's mother, exaggerating various qualities of her into forces of nature.