A Litany for Survival

“A Litany for Survival” is a free verse poem with 44 lines of varying lengths, from lines that are a single word, such as “futures” (Line 11), to lines that almost reach to the right-hand margin, such as “like a faint line in the center of our foreheads” (Line 17). This means that the poem has a varied, unset meter. Lorde breaks these lines into four stanzas of varying lengths. The first stanza is 14 lines, the second stanza is 10 lines, the third stanza is 17 lines, and the final stanza is three lines. The longer length of the third stanza reflects its content—a list of dichotomies that instill fear in marginalized people. Lorde also highlights the structure of the list by beginning Stanza 3 with the capitalized conjunction “And” (Line 25).

Stanzas 1, 3, and 4 begin with a capitalized word, marking the beginning of a sentence, and end punctuation (a semicolon and period) only appears at the end of stanzas. This makes three stanzas appear to contain only one sentence. However, in Stanza 2, there are three capitalized words. Line 15 opens the stanza with a capital, and Lines 22 and 24 also contain two capital-letter words.