Tissue Literary Elements

This is a first-person speaker who holds the view that the fragility of paper is similar to that of human life. The speaker directly addresses the reader in the second person.

The poem is comprised of nine quatrains and a single line at the end, all written in free verse.

Metaphors
-The poem as a whole is structured as an extended metaphor of paper as living, transparent tissue.
-"If buildings were paper, I might / feel their drift" (Lines 13-14): Buildings are imagined as paper.
-"An architect could use all this, / place layer over layer, luminous / script over numbers over line" (Lines 25-27): The products of writing are compared to building materials.

Similes
-"fly our lives like paper kites" (Line 24): The way that money relates to our lives is compared to flying a paper kite.

Alliteration
-"pages smoothed and stroked" (Line 11): The /s/ repeats.
-"what was paid by credit cards" (Line 23): The /c/ repeats.
-"the marks / that rivers make, roads, / railtracks..." (Lines 18-20): The /r/ repeats.
-"place layer over layer, luminous..." (Line 26): The /l/ repeats.
-"never wish to build again with brick // or block"(Lines 28-29): The /b/ repeats.
-"transparent, // turned into your skin" (Lines 36-37): The /t/ repeats.

The image of the speaker imagining buildings made of paper is ironic because it is so unexpected—of course, paper structures would not hold up the way concrete does. But this image is further developed and explained, and the initial irony fades.

Lyric, Praise Poem, Allegory

The setting is unspecified, taking place in the speaker's mind as the reader is guided through various mediations on paper.

Meditative, Pensive, Constructive, Humble

The protagonist is the speaker who meditates on paper and the transitive nature of life. The antagonist is human hubris that believes in immortality and permanence.

The conflict that the poem suggests is that many people do not want to consider mortality because it makes them feel fragile. But, as told through the metaphor of paper, fragility is a sign of being well-loved. It is what allows the light to shine through.

The climax arrives when the speaker, instead of just hinting at the connection with the metaphor of paper as humanity, outright states that the structure the architect raises is made of the reader's skin.

The title of the poem foreshadows the multiple ways in which "tissue" is explored in the poem as both paper and human skin.

N/A

The poem alludes to the stories of creation in Abrahamic religions or in spiritual worldviews. By presenting an architect who creates buildings, the poet alludes to the creator of human life.

-The image of "a hand" writing a genealogy into the back of the Koran is a synecdoche that defines the person by their hand.

-The "credit card" could be considered a synecdoche for the entire modern financial system.

Paper is personified in the poem when grocery slips "might fly our lives like paper kites" (Line 24).

N/A

In the line, "they fall away on a sigh, a shift" the word "sigh" is an onomatopoeia that is used to describe relief.