Like the ghazal, the pantoum is well-known for its narrative style, often seeming like a short self-contained story, with the end written so as to create a direct link with the beginning, such as in Peter Meinke’s “Atomic Pantoum” (Meinke 258). From the beginning, a pantoum creates a sense of motion and action; in “Atomic Pantoum,” this is the fission of nuclei, which from the beginning imparts a sense of foreboding that is then carried throughout the rest of the poem, and a sense of inevitability follows, with Meinke’s repetition of “a chain reaction.” This “chain reaction” is made more literal, as Meinke repeats the second line of the previous stanza as the first line of the next, showing how the destruction will force progress backwards, and yet what comes after is a direct result of the cascading series of events, as highlighted by “and start this all over” in the second stanza. This repeating nature of the effect proceeding the cause (for example, the “chain reaction” caused by “the neutrons releas[ing]”) also highlights the pantoum’s nature as a universe within itself (Gotera 235).
The effects of the use of this weapon can be seen through contradiction, as this release ends up leading to “choirs crumb[ling], with Meinke noting that “we [humans] are dying to use it” (Meinke 258). While a reading of this as solely figurative language does indeed have merit, the hyperbolic warning, that we as a species are all too likely to want to use our power to “blow open some others” (Meinke 258).
The last line, “we sing to Jesus,” can be interpreted in various different ways; as in mourning for the deaths caused, as in praise to Him for bringing down such power on the enemy, and also, that man has, in a sense, become God, able to be on the same level of power as Him (Meinke 258); arriving to this point is a chain reaction of the path of the poem’s form.
The bomb itself can also be seen as symbolic of the pantoum form; small and condensed, yet packing enormous potential within, it is the before, the during, and the after.
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Meike, Peter. “Atomic Pantoum” An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art, Edited by Anne Finch and Kathrine Varnes, U. of Michigan Press, 2002, p 258.