The Red Sweater

“The Red Sweater” is twenty-eight lines of unrhymed free verse organized in two stanzas. The longer first section is twenty-two lines and focuses on the red sweater. The six lines of the second section shifts to the mother’s fast-food uniform and her work time outside of the twenty-hour block of time it took to earn the money for the sweater.

The poem does not follow a set formal pattern, but most of the lines appear in groups of four, three, six, or five similarly stressed iambic syllables. The overall effect makes the poem sound like natural speech, which reinforces the personal nature of the poem and makes the speaker sound both familiar and relatable.

Enjambment occurs throughout the poem. The running-over of the phrases forces the reader to knit pieces together as they progress through the text. The title is drawn into the first line in a move that highlights the importance of the red sweater to everything that follows. The first line, “slides down into my body, soft” (Line 1) encourages the reader to consider the word “soft,” briefly linking it to “slides” and “body” before joining it to the second line “lambs wool” (Line 2).