"Starlight" is a free verse poem, almost artless in its construction. The tone is conversational, as if the speaker is recounting the memory at an intimate gathering of friends. This tone is fitting for the anecdotal quality of the poem. Although Levine does not use much rhyme in this poem, he does use repetition, and light use of synaesthesia to give the memory a dreamlike character. Apposition, a grammatical construction in which a noun or a noun phrase is placed with another as an explanatory equivalent, is a form of repetition which Levine uses in the following lines:

and the voice, my father's voice, is not his voice, but somehow thick and choked,

a voice I have not heard before, but heard often since....

These lines thicken the description of the father's voice and readers have to slow down to digest them, just as the child in the...