Joan’s repetitions pace and shape the poem, framing jokes or laying special emphasis on important moments.
For example, when Joan has been Pope for a little while and explored what the job has to offer—mostly “blessing and blessing the air,” as she puts it with some exhausted diacope—she makes her pronouncement on the papacy and Catholicism itself in these brisk terms:
I came to believe
that I did not believe a word
Her diacope on “believe” there makes this moment feel especially comic, underscoring the irreverent shock of a Pope who, contrary to the old saying, isn’t Catholic.
A more reverent repetition appears when Joan retells the story of how she gave birth. On that fateful day, she says, she felt closer to the “power of God” than she ever had before. In lines 24-25, she remembers feeling as if God’s hand were:
lifting me, flinging me down
lifting me, flinging me down
Ending one stanza with these words and beginning the next with them, Joan evokes the rhythmic spasms of labor; the two lines feel like two contractions. She also lingers on this powerful image for a moment, as if marveling even now at how powerful and compelling labor felt.