Sylvia Plath's use of tercet, or group of three lines to a stanza, serves to express her difficult thoughts to the reader. In reading the poem, each stanza conveys some concept, or some event, whose expression can almost not be conveyed to the reader in words, the events are so horror-filled and difficult to describe. Thus the few words in each tercet create the powerful imagery of events and experiences of the holocaust. Each grouping of thought, each tercet, has space before the next begins, as if to give the reader a bit of an opportunity to ponder and absorb each hard experience being stated.