The speaker's repetitions give her voice a tone of passionate despair. For instance, take lines 3-6:
I wish and I wish I were a man:
Or, better than any being, were not:
Were nothing at all in all the world.
Not a body and not a soul:
The diacope on "I wish and I wish" paints a picture of a person who spends most of her days sitting listlessly in a parlor, doing nothing but longing hopelessly for a different life. But that idle wishing takes on fearful energy over the next few lines:
- The anaphora on "were not" and "were nothing" sounds desperate and insistent, as if the speaker wants to make sure her listener understands her: she wants, not to be dead, but never to have existed.
- Likewise, the anaphora on "not a body and not a soul" drives that point home: the speaker doesn't just want to die and leave her body behind, but to be so completely nothing that she isn't even a soul.
- The diacope of "nothing at all in all the world" underscores the speaker's desire for annihilation.
If she didn't exist, the speaker goes on, the world wouldn't change one bit. More parallelism helps her to make that point:
Still the world would wag on the same,
Still the seasons go and come:
Blossoms bloom as in days of old,
Cherries ripen and wild bees hum.
The anaphora on "still" there stresses the speaker's sense that her disappearance wouldn't change a thing, as does the parallelism in the lines tracing the undisturbed change of the seasons. Here, the speaker's insistence reveals a more complicated, poignant feeling. This picture of the world going on unchanged without her reflects her feeling for the rhythms of nature, suggesting that she knows some things about life are beautiful—and that this beauty isn't enough to save her from despair.
As the poem ends, the speaker echoes her own earlier words: if she were "nothing at all in all the world," then "none would miss [her] in all the world." This repetition reveals a sweeping but unjustified certainty: after all, as the first lines show, someone is listening to and reporting this speaker's words even now. Even if someone does care for the speaker, however, she can only see life as a long trudge. If she disappeared, she concludes, the rest of the world would be left on its own to "wake and weary and fall asleep"—a moment of polysyndeton that suggests the speaker's exhaustion with the relentless, meaningless march of the days.