Question

Read the poem "Sonnet in Primary Colors” by Rita Dove.

This is for the woman with one black wing
perched over her eyes: lovely Frida, erect
among parrots, in the stern petticoats of the peasant,
who painted herself a present—
wildflowers entwining the plaster corset
her spine resides in, that flaming pillar—
this priestess in the romance of mirrors.

Each night she lay down in pain and rose
to the celluloid butterflies of her Beloved Dead,
Lenin and Marx and Stalin arrayed at the footstead.
And rose to her easel, the hundred dogs panting
like children along the graveled walks of the garden, Diego’s
love a skull in the circular window
of the thumbprint searing her immutable brow.

What structural element is apparent in this poem?

repeating lines
rhyme scheme
regular meter
stanzas

Answer 1

Stanzas.

The poem is a 14-line sonnet divided into two stanzas (two septets — lines 1–7 and 8–14).