Our speaker is a bit of a hypnotist. He lulls you along on the journey with some serious musical magic.
He's got tons of pairs of alliterative words:
- wagon/wheels (14)
- ledges/lines (15)
- forty/firkins (22)
- rustle/rushes(24)
- dent/dough(47)
- goblet/Grail (57)
He also likes to repeat words close together, or at least similar versions of one word:
- house/house (5)
- farm/farm (6)
- town/town (7)
- forty/forty (21-22)
- height/height (33)
- lost/lost (35-36)
- playthings/playhouse (43)
- house/house (45)
- playhouse/house (48)
- destination/destiny (49)
Lots o' pairs, no? Maybe those pairs help emphasize a central theme in the poem: the duality of the past and present. What we see in front of us in this poem are the remnants of a past that no longer exists, a past we can access only by drinking from the broken goblet, which will help us become whole again.