Repetition as Advancement

The most salient theme of “The Bean Eaters” is the idea of repetition, which functions visually and conceptually to advance the poem’s narrative. Eight words are notably repeated, making up 16 of the poem’s 79 total words, while the word “and” appears a total of eight times. In other words, almost a third of the poem’s diction, or individual word choices, constitute repetition. Aside from “beans” (1, 11), which appears in the first and third quatrains, and “mostly” (1), which has its match “Mostly” (5) in the second stanza, all of the other significant repeated words occur in the same couplets, or two-line units. “Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood, / Tin flatware” (3-4) repeats “plain” and “ware,” while “Two who are Mostly Good. / Two who have lived their day” (5-6) features anaphora, and “But keep putting on their clothes / And putting things away” (7-8) repeats...