“No Vow,” much like the other works of Ann Fisher-Wirth, is rich in description and playful and musical in terms of linguistic sound. In the first stanza, phrases like “painted saint” or “wooden shrine presides over the hillside,” make use of the stringing together of similar sounds to create a interesting diction and noticeable musicality. This sort of construction of sound is less present in the second stanza; this presents a slight shift in structure that accompanies the slight shift in tone of the second stanza from the first. These differences are interesting as both stanzas begin with the same pair of words, so there is an intentionally established connection between the two. The first stanza seems to focus more on what the “you” of the poem is feeling in regards to the surrounding environment. The second stanza furthers the comparison, stating that even if the feelings of the subject of the poem were warranted, there is not much to be actively done in terms of the subject’s current situation.
This poem differs in a notable way from the majority of the other works we have read by Fisher-Wirth in the sense that it lacks a direct first-person point-of-view, and also is less directed towards an externally expressed sense of intimate family love. The slight ambiguity of the speaker and the subject and this poem leaves these sort of things up to an interpretation, a kind of open-endedness the other poems do not seem to have.