The poem has a conversational tone and is written with an inconsistent rhyme scheme, relying more often on near-rhymes or a lack of rhyme to create a sense of momentum and unexpected development. There is an exception to this general rule: In the poem’s third stanza, an ABCABC rhyme scheme is followed quite strictly (years/fear, shacks/back, carried/married), but this is the only stanza in the poem that conforms to such an even rhyme scheme. This may be because the third stanza is when the speaker recalls how the photo helped him to maintain a sense of order and stability in the midst of a chaotic situation (the war), and the stanza’s conformity to a rhyme scheme reinforces this sense of order he describes. In contrast, the other stanzas—which sometimes have rhymes and sometimes do not—help to embody the sense of ambiguity and fluctuating emotional states the speaker experiences in recalling his more complex feelings toward his former wife.

The poem is built around a series of flashbacks inspired by the speaker’s rediscovery of the photo. A flashback occurs in a literary text when the narrator or speaker describes an event (or events) that occurred prior to the present action.