17 pages • 34 minutes read
Mary TallMountainThe Last Wolf
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1995A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Form and Meter
“The Last Wolf” is a free verse poem that does not subscribe to a consistent meter. The lines and stanzas all vary in length. This is fairly characteristic for much of TallMountain’s personal poetry canon.
TallMountain’s description of the poem coming from “some spirit person” in her interview with Bruchac loosely places it in the category of “automatic writing.” Automatic writing is when the poet allows themself to be a conduit for a spirit, often closing their eyes or writing in the dark without planning. In the traditional western canon, W. B. Yeats’s wife Georgie famously practiced automatic writing.
Further, “The Last Wolf” can be considered part of the Native American Renaissance, a controversial term applied to indigenous authors who gained mainstream popularity after the 1960s.
Repetition
TallMountain utilizes repetition to emphasize the theme of indigenous languages being erased. The language of the wolf represents these endangered languages; TallMountain repeats the very specific term “baying” in Lines 3 and 11, both of which are the third lines of their respective stanzas. This repetition of both individual words and their placement within a stanza offers two levels of emphasis. The significance of the loss of language is also seen in the repetition of “heard” (Lines 3 and 20) and “hear” (Line 15). Here, the iterations change tense as well as placement within their stanzas—stanza two contains two examples in two tenses. The fact that there are more instances of hearing than talking (“baying”) demonstrates the importance of listening to the preservation of language.
Enjambment
Another literary device TallMountain uses is enjambment—the continuation of one line of poetry onto the next without the use of end stop punctuation such as a comma or period. The entire poem makes use of enjambment, as TallMountain opts to use only two periods to punctuate the two lines comprising the final stanza. Allowing sentences to span across several lines allows for multiple readings: reading grammatically to the end of the sentence or reading the clauses in individual lines separate from their complete sentence. Giving the clause, or incomplete sentence, “left standing” (Line 7) its own line opens up the phrase to be applied to not only the “highrises [sic]” (Line 6) that precede it, but also to other subjects. While the speaker sits in a bed, the building in which the bed resides and the traffic lights in the second stanza are still standing—like the high rises.
Although proper nouns and pronouns, like “Montgomery Street” (Line 5) and “I” (Line 3) are capitalized—in addition to the first words of each stanza—the lack of punctuation and enjambment open up more readings of the lines than punctuated, end-stopped lines would. The poem can be read almost entirely without pause until the reader reaches the final stanza. Although only two lines in length, the periods at the end of each of the two lines in the last stanza offer a weight not necessarily felt in the rest of the poem. The periods require the reader to pause, to consider what the speaker has just said. TallMountain’s strategic use of periods here focuses the reader’s attention on the message of each line. The result is a conclusion to a poem with which a reader cannot help but to sit and consider long after the entire poem has been read.
