"Men at Forty" by Donald Justice [pg. 199]

The first line starts with the title. It make it feel as if "men at forty" is the main subject of the poem. It identifies the subject for the poem right in the beginning. The first two verses are broken into sentences. The third verse continues into the middle of the fourth verse since the idea is unfinished. The sentences are broken this way to keep the structure of four lines per verse. A few of the lines rhyme. The first three lines end with the sound "tee", "lee", and "bee", respectively. The lines could have been broken to keep the rhymes. Usually, one line would begin with a noun or an action. The next lines become the adjectives and other descriptions for the previous lines. I have tried reading the lines one by one. After reading the end of one line, I'm left asking "what?". The next line would respond to my question or even do farther in describing what I wanted to find out more about. The poem does not have many natural pauses (4 periods and 6 commas). The line breaks naturally slows the reading of the line to introduce the next idea. The lines with figurative language seem to be the longest. They are not broken up since that would break up the image into to semi-separate ones. Justice keeps the ideas in whole pieces as he separates different ones.