In the poem "To the doctor who treated the raped baby and who felt such despair," the word "and" is repeated at the beginning of seven different...

This question refers to a poem by Finuala Dowling, a contemporary award-winning South African poet and writer.  Understanding her time and place helps put the poem in the right context for analysis.  This poem describes a scene that could be happening today.

Your question about the repetition of the word 'and' highlights a very powerful literary technique.  Whenever a poet repeats a word, particularly a seemingly mundane word like 'and,' we have to consider the rationale. 

Looking...

This question refers to a poem by Finuala Dowling, a contemporary award-winning South African poet and writer.  Understanding her time and place helps put the poem in the right context for analysis.  This poem describes a scene that could be happening today.

Your question about the repetition of the word 'and' highlights a very powerful literary technique.  Whenever a poet repeats a word, particularly a seemingly mundane word like 'and,' we have to consider the rationale. 

Looking carefully at the structure of this poem, we can see that there is very little punctuation, but there is some.  The entire poem consists of three sentences.  The first sentence comprises the first 21 lines of the poem; the second sentence is the next three lines; and the final sentence is the final single line.  There is a frenetic quality about the first, overly long sentence.  If you wrote something like this yourself, outside of the context of a poem, you would likely be criticized and would be encouraged to chop it into shorter sentences.  But by keeping the single very long sentence of independent clauses joined by "and... and... and... and," Dowling makes the reader feel the anxiety and also highlights how much the doctor is doing.  The doctor staunched the blood AND administered an opiate AND called for more blood AND stitched the wound, etc.  When you read this poem aloud, those "and"s take a place of prominence and emphasize the doctor's actions.  Finally, eventually, the first sentence comes to a close and ends with a period.  The next sentence then begins with "And."  Normally, it would be considered grammatically incorrect to start a sentence with a conjunction.  In this case, however, the pause of the period gives the reader a rest, just as the family in the poem can finally rest once the surgery is over.  The "And" this time connects the thoughts, but the punctuation creates a sense of relief.  The absence of an "and" in the final line completely separates it from the first part of the poem, and the reader gets the sense that the family can now really get some rest and some sleep.

This ending is reminiscent of the closing of Robert Frost's "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening."  The two poems are very different in style and theme, but the final two lines of "Stopping By Woods" present a similar feeling with, "And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep."  Many essays have been written about the repetition in those two lines.