Stewart comments in an interview with Jon Thompson for the online magazine Free Verse that her poetry collection The Forest "was concerned with the relations between unconscious and conscious knowledge of the past." The comment partly explains the unusual repetitive structure of the poem. Lines appear and are then repeated in the next stanza, according to the following pattern, consistently applied throughout the poem: line 1 of each stanza is repeated in line 2 of the next stanza, and line 3 of each stanza is repeated in line 4 of the next stanza.
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