The enchantment of a poem lies in its conciseness of diction, variety of forms and abundance of connotations. As a literary genre, emotions, feelings and ideas of the poet can all be expressed by limited length, and merely changing a few words can let readers have different senses. Therefore, whether using simple language or florid bits of writing, word choice of a poem is always vital because it helps readers better understand the content and as well reflects thesis in both direct and indirect way. C. K. Williams's poems can serve as typical examples of showing the significance of word choice. These poems, especially free verses, have common characters that reveal "the states of alienation, deception, and occasional enlightenment" (Poetry Foundation) that exist between public and private lives in modern urban America, and among them is a famous poem called "The Lover" written in 1987. Readers can quite go deep into it via analyzing its rhyme, word choice and the profound meaning behind the poem in turns.

There are various types of rhymes in English poem, including alliteration, assonance, consonance and end rhyme. They can give the poem strong rhythm in structure and enhance the appeal of language in content. "The Lover" is a free verse and it does not have so many rhythms by contrast with most classical poems, but its repetitions and rhymes are still fascinating to readers and worth analyzing. Evidently, readers can hear the way the action in this poem in a series of parallel statements: "so/ decorous, so distant, barely, just barely touching their fiery wings, their clanging" (6-7). This sort of repetition is one way the poet creates rhythm, and the repetition continuously elevates readers' mood, the mood for blaming their shameless behavior. Besides, consonance is used in the poem: "their glances, hers and the lover's, that is, not the husband's, seemed so/ decorous," (5-6). The consonant /s/ is repeated several times in order to emphasize how frequent the eye contacts between the woman and her lover and how much they suppress motions. The way the repetition and rhymes illuminate and reveal the story happened in the poem, in a series of pulsing, parallel flashes, recalls C. K. Williams's own technique, his narrative syntax and energy.

As a Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry, C. K. Williams favors "long lines bursting with modifiers", and he includes "interesting stories, editorials, new flashes from around the world and across the street" in a level tone (qtd. in American Poetry). Thus, readers can usually observe that there are simple words as well as rhetorical flourishes used in his poem. The first three lines introduce a common scene of a mother who carries her children to extracurricular class. While beyond readers' expectation, then comes a small climax that the woman encounters her husband and her lover at the same time. C. K. Williams specifically describes their eye contacts via using words "glances" (5), "decorous" (6) to indicate their nervousness. While furthermore, they have to tamp down their emotions and calm down so that their relationship will not be found by the woman's husband but their hearts have already come together with the word "fiery wings" (7), which symbolizes inward fervency and strong emotions. After that, the story turns to the other scene and the most dramatic climax approaches. The unfaithful woman hears the pair of typists give their choral denunciation of her, her husband and her lover after she had erotic love. The poet uses colloquial expressions, actually some swear words such as "the blind pig" (12), "the horny bitch" (13) and "sanctimonious, lying bastard" (15). The two typists regard their relationship as jokes, and they sneer the ignorance of the husband, the unfaithfulness of the woman and the guile of woman's lover, which are ironical and absurd. Although the poet does not directly point out that typists' tease is the consequences of adultery, they make readers ponder its degradation.

Works Cited

• C. K. Williams. "The Lover." The Oxford Book of American Poetry, edited by David Lehman, Oxford University Press, 2006, p.926.