One Today

Alliteration is the repetition of initial consonant sounds in nearby letters. Alliteration does not occur often in the poem, but some examples include the repetition of “m” in “millions of faces in morning’s mirrors” (Line 7); “w” in “whistling, / or whispers” (Lines 40-41); and, in the poem’s conclusion, “h” in “head home” (Line 61). As “One Today” was written with the purpose of being spoken aloud, these uses of alliteration add a bit of poetic fluidity and convention to the otherwise free-verse poem.

An uncommon alliteration that Blanco uses is the repeated “w” sound in the phrase “one wind” (Lines 35, 45), which helps emphasize one of the poem’s important unifying images. (The word “one,” although it not spelled with a “w,” nevertheless contributes to the alliteration since it is pronounced with a “w” sound.)

Anaphora is a literary device in which a word or a phrase at the beginning of a line is repeated at the beginning of the next line and sometimes of subsequent lines as well. This poem employs anaphora in the last two lines, which refer to the future that awaits the US (metaphorically referred to as a “new constellation” [Line 67]). All of its citizens can create it by working together; it is “waiting for us to map it: waiting for us to name it—together” (Lines 68-69).

Blanco also makes use of simple repetition of single words, such as the four-times mentioned “hands” in the following passage, which conveys a picture of thousands of people working at various tasks:

and hands, hands gleaning coal or planting windmills

in deserts and hilltops that keep us warm, hands

digging trenches, routing pipes and cables, hands

as worn as my father’s cutting sugarcane (Lines 30-33).

He repeats the word “hear” in order to stress the many sounds of the US: “Hear: squeaky playground swings, trains whistling, / or whispers across café tables, Hear: the doors we open / for each other all day” (Lines 40-41).

Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds in nearby letters. A particularly striking example occurs with the threefold repetition of “u” in “plum blush of dusk” (Line 62). Another example of assonance with “u” sounds occurs in Line 1: “One sun rose on us.” (Again, the word “one,” although it is not spelled with a “u,” contributes to the assonance since, like “sun” and “us,” it contains a “u” sound.)

The poem has much visual, aural, and tactile imagery. Topographic visual imagery of mountains, lakes, and plains occurs in the first stanza, and visual imagery of celestial bodies (including the sun, moon, and stars), the celestial sphere (the sky), and natural phenomena such as the sunrise, wind, rain, and snow, as well as the surface of the earth (“ground” [Line 27]), are scattered throughout the poem. Physical objects feature, too, such as buses, fruit stands, trucks, and traffic lights. Aural imagery (related to sounds and the sense of hearing) occurs especially in Stanzas 5 and 6 (“hear” [Lines 35, 40, 41]), with honking cabs, footsteps, train whistles, the squeaky playground swings, and the words people use to greet each other. Tactile imagery (related to the sense of touch) is found in Stanza 4 with the repetition of “hands” and the many tasks they perform. With this imagery, the reader is encouraged to see, hear, and touch many aspects of the US as it moves through its day.

Metonymy is a figure of speech in which something is referred to by a word or name that is an attribute of or is associated with it or part of it in some way. In “One light, waking up rooftops” (Line 5), the metonym “rooftops” refers to houses (since all houses have rooftops), which in turn refers to the people who live in the houses, who are the ones being woken up.

Personification is a figure of speech in which an inanimate thing is described as if it had human attributes. For example, in the first lines of the poem, the sun is presented as “peeking over the Smokies, greeting the faces of the Great Lakes, spreading a simple truth” (Lines 2-3). Similarly, in that passage, the Great Lakes are personified since they have faces. The sun is also personified when it is referred to as “one light / breathing color into stained glass windows” (Lines 22-23). In other words, the sun is presented as able to breathe, like a living creature.

A simile compares two unlike things in a way that brings out a similarity between them. Thus, on fruit stands, “apples, limes, and oranges” are “arrayed like rainbows” (Line 10). Also, the moon “is like a silent drum tapping on every rooftop” (Line 64). Similes can usually be recognized by the use of the words “like” or “as,” although this is not always the case: “[P]encil-yellow school buses” (Line 9), for example, is a simile that compares the color of school buses with yellow pencils.