Composition
Outer composition
The poem “Colonization in Reverse” by Louise Bennett-Coverley has a simple outer composition. The poem has a total of 44 verses split into 11 stanzas of four lines each. A stanza composed of four lines is also called a quatrain. The verses are of medium length from five to nine syllables, with most containing seven syllables. This offers a certain musicality to the poem. Most of the stanzas contain one sentence which runs across the four lines in a technique called enjambment. However, some stanzas include short interjections which split the stanza into multiple sentences, such as:
What a islan! What a people!
Man an woman, old an young
Jus a pack dem bag an baggage
An tun history upside dung! (ll. 13-16)
The poem follows a fixed...