Perhaps the World Ends Here

Harjo’s “Perhaps the World Ends Here” is a free-verse poem, which means it neither rhymes nor has a regular meter. It is written in long, prose-like lines that extend to the edge of the page and—depending on page width—even beyond the margin, causing lines to double over.

The poem consists of 11 stanzas, with each stanza containing one to three sentences. It also features no line breaks, and, because of this, it reads similarly to a piece of prose, the sentence being the only break that defines one thought from another. Harjo’s use of the sentence in poetry functions as rhythm in and of itself. Alternating between long sentences and short, she creates a sort of seesawing rhythm. An exemplary line is Stanza 4: Following a lengthy, 15-word sentence (“It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human” [Line 4]), Harjo writes a punchy, attention-grabbing sentence, “We make men at it, we make women” (Line 4). This alteration between long and short sentences retains the reader’s attention and places emphasis on the shorter lines. Another example of this is in Stanza 10, which is broken into three sentences of varying lengths.