username@email.com
username@email.com
In this lesson, we’ll examine various poetic conventions, including form, sound, graphic elements, and literary devices.
Before one can fully understand the various forms that poems take, it is necessary to look at its many different parts. Just as novels are broken into paragraphs and chapters, poetry utilizes specific terminology to define different sections of each poem.
Each line of poetry can be divided into words, syllables, and feet. The word feet (or foot) describes a unit of poetry. Each unit, or foot, is composed of a particular order of accented or unaccented syllables. How the feet are arranged determines the meter (or measured rhythm) of a poem. Scanning a line of poetry to determine its foot and meter is called scansion. Scansion is one way of approaching a poem and gives people a common language with which to discuss poetry. Let us first look at the elements of scansion before taking a moment to practice it.
One part of scansion is identifying the type of feet used in a poem. There are six major types of regular feet. For a concise review of poetic feet, use the table below.
Types of Regular Feet |
||
|
Type of Foot |
Syllabic Pattern |
Example |
| IAMB
Commonly used in English poetry |
Two syllables:
first unstressed, second stressed |
Shall I / compare / thee to / a
Sum / mer’s day? |
| TROCHEE
Rarely used in English poetry; might be mixed with iambs for a harsh effect |
Two syllables:
first stressed, second unstressed |
Tyger, / Tyger,/ burning / bright
In the / forests / of the / night |
| DACTYL
Poems composed entirely of dactyls are rare. |
Three syllables:
first stressed, second and third unstressed |
This is the / forest pri / meval. The /
murmuring / pines and the / hemlocks (Notice the iamb at the end of the line) |
| ANAPEST
Allows for strong rhymes |
Three syllables:
first and second unstressed, third stressed |
‘Twas the night / before Christ / mas and all /
through the house |
| SPONDEE
This is a rarely used, very restrictive meter. Usually found as an anomaly within another meter. |
Two syllables:
both stressed |
Soon it will / break down / unaware.
“Break down” is the spondee in the middle of the line. |
| PYRRHIC
Another restrictive meter |
Two syllables:
both unstressed |
In a / minute
“In a” is the pyrrhic foot. |
Once you understand how a foot of poetry is put together, you need to know how those feet are put together to form meter. All of these feet can be put together in groups of one (monometer), two (dimeter), three (trimeter), four (tetrameter), five (pentameter), or more syllables. So, if a poem is written in iambic pentameter, it has five iambs for a total of ten syllables. A poem written in anapest tetrameter has four anapests for a total of twelve syllables.
Let’s try a little scansion now, shall we?
Remember to count the syllables in a typical line first. Then read that line and mark the stressed and unstressed syllables. Use a ( ˘ ) symbol to mark an unstressed syllable and a ( ` ) to mark a stressed syllable. It’s important to note that stresses often fall on important words such as nouns and verbs. Next you’ll want to notice whether the pattern matches a known foot or not. Finally, count the feet and name the meter.
Let’s try it with a verse from William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.
But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun!
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
Who is already sick and pale with grief,
That thou her maid art far more fair than she:
Be not her maid, since she is envious;
Her vestal livery is but sick and green,
And none but fools do wear it; cast it off.
It is my lady; O! it is my love:
O! that she knew she were.
Note that the typical line has ten syllables. (In the second line, Juliet must be said with two syllables to make the ten syllables.) After marking the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, you’ll find that this is an iamb. You should count a total of five iambs, which means this soliloquy is written in iambic pentameter.
It’s interesting to note that iambic pentameter is the most widely used meter due to the fact that it so closely resembles natural speech. This fact helps explains why Shakespeare’s plays are so timeless. The rhythm of the lines sounds like talking. Iambic pentameter is also called blank verse, which we’ll discuss next.
Blank verse is a line with five stressed and five unstressed syllables for a total of ten syllables. It is called iambic pentameter because it has five (penta) iambs (iambic). The famous Elizabethan dramatist Christopher Marlowe was the first to master blank verse, but Shakespeare is the one who made it famous.
“A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse.” is an example of blank verse (iambic pentameter) from Shakespeare. If you mark the syllables, you can see the pattern.
“A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse.”
It is worth noting that Shakespeare sometimes changes from iambic pentameter to prose in his plays. This transition often allows the reader insight into the nature of a character. Often the idiots or commoners in his play speak in prose as opposed to blank verse.
A stanza is a group of lines that constitute a unit within a longer poem. Stanzas are the paragraphs of poetry. Stanzas were originally intended to assist the poet when the poem was put to music. The stanza change indicated some shift in the music, perhaps from verse to refrain. Now the stanza change represents a pause for the reader. It might also represent a shift, however subtle or sudden, in ideas. Not all works of poetry have more than one stanza. Ballads and quatrains are such examples and will be discussed later in this lesson.
A couplet is a pair of lines that usually rhyme. In a closed couplet, the entire thought is contained within that one couplet. In an open couplet, the idea may run into the next couplet. Some couplets may have caesuras, or pauses, to break up whatever sing-song quality the line presents.
Like chapters in a novel, cantos are shorter sections of a poetic work. Cantos may be divided by action or theme. Lord Byron and Alexander Pope divided their poems into cantos, but the most famous work in cantos is Dante’s Divine Comedy. Its three cantiche (or canticas or “parts”) titled Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradisio are made up of thirty-three cantos each. Inferno actually has thirty-four cantos, but the first canto serves an introduction to the entire piece.
Now that we’ve discussed the basic elements or building blocks of poetic form, we should take a moment and consider the bigger picture. How does a poet decide which form a new poem will take, for instance? Which format will best convey his or her emotions? Let’s examine the most common forms of poetry and see if we can’t shed some light on the reasons behind why poets make the decisions they do.
Just as in abstract art, abstract poetry does not subscribe to normal poetic conventions. The words are the thing. In fact, the meaning of the poem is secondary to the sound of the words. See how the whimsicality of the words that comprise Lewis Carroll’s “The Jabberwocky” makes more of an impression than the implied meaning of the words?
‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”
A totally different kind of poem is the ballad. It’s a poem meant to be sung that often deals with fatal relationships. The ballad allows the writer to communicate deep emotions or to tell a story of love or common courage. The ballad might also have a refrain. The traditional British ballad stanza has four lines and an abab rhyme scheme whose first and third lines have four stressed syllables and second and fourth lines have three accented syllables. The following stanza is from “The Unquiet Grave.” It possibly dates from 1400 but was collected by Francis James Child much later, in 1868. It conforms to the structure described above.
The wind doth blow today, my love,
And a few small drops of rain;
I never had but one true-love,
In cold grave Bible was lain.
Very much unlike the ballad, the cinquain, or “grouping of five,” is a five-line stanza or a poem in five lines. It usually does not rhyme, and it sometimes moves in iambs. The cinquain was a reaction to Japanese haiku poetry. Carl Sandburg made cinquain famous in his anthology Cornhuskers. The syllable structure of a cinquain poem typically looks like this:
Line 1: two syllables
Line 2: four syllables
Line 3: six syllables
Line 4: eight syllables
Line 5: two syllables
Adelaide Crapsey conceived of the cinquain, though Sandburg made the type widely known. From Crapsey’s posthumously published Verse (1915), here’s “Triad.”
These be
Three silent things:
The falling snow . . . the hour
Before the dawn . . . the mouth of one
Just dead.
Standing in sharp contrast to the cinquain is dramatic poetry. This poetic form is actually a long, reflective speech given by a narrator that typically addresses another character. Most dramatic poetry is written in monologue form and traces its roots back to ancient Greece.
Another of the oldest forms of poetry is the elegy, a poem of mourning that focuses specifically on the death of someone or generally on some sort of sorrow. The word eulogy is derived from it, and its original source came from the Greek elegos. The elegy has no particular form. One of the most famous elegies, Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” begins:
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
Now fades the glimm’ring landscape on the sight,
And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds;
An epigram is usually thought of as a short, terse witticism. The following is a perfect example:
“I can resist everything except temptation.” -Oscar Wilde
Epigrams, though, are also a poetic form. Tracing its roots to Greece, the epigram was originally a brief inscription written on a grave or monument (epigram comes from the Greek words that signify “to write on”). It evolved into its current form: a short, witty poem ending with a clever twist. Most poetic epigrams are written as couplets, unlike the one-line zingers characterized by the Wilde example. The following epigram by John Dryden illustrates the poetic form most clearly:
Here lies my wife; here let her lie!
Now she’s at rest and so am I!
Haiku is both a form and a genre. Haiku poems do not use complicated grammar or words and are often about everyday objects and experiences. Haikus do not usually include similes and metaphors. The traditional haiku is comprised of three short lines with the second being a little longer than the first and third. The lines are, consecutively, five, seven, and five syllables in length. One of the most famous haiku authors is Matsuo Basho. An example of his mastery of the form can be seen in the following poem:
Listen! a frog
Jumping into the silence
Of an ancient pond
Unlike the haiku, the heroic couplet is longer and combines lines of iambic pentameter that rhyme in pairs. The rhyme scheme is aabbcc, and so on. Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock” is written in heroic couplets to make the silly subject of the poem, a haircut, seem more intense and epic, thus creating delicious irony.
What dire offence from amorous causes springs,
What mighty contests rise from trivial things,
I sing–This verse to CARYLL, Muse! is due:
This, ev’n Belinda may vouchsafe to view:
Light verse is a type of poetry, not necessarily a form of poetry. It includes less serious forms such as
We’ve discussed the epigram. Parodies and nursery rhymes are understood, but the limerick needs to be defined. This particular kind of poem is constructed in a rigid five lines with an aabba rhyme scheme. The first, second, and fifth lines are written in anapestic tetrameter with the others in dimeter. The last line of a limerick often packs a comedic punch. Many limericks are bawdy; in fact, most are too risqué to print here. Here is a tamer version of the form, a limerick by the famous artist, illustrator, nonsense poet, and limerick writer Edward Lear:
There was an Old Lady whose folly
Induced her to sit in a holly:
Whereupon by a thorn
Her dress being torn,
She quickly became melancholy.
Less nonsensical and rigid is the ode. Odes are lyric poems that celebrate a person or object. There are three types of odes. Pindaric odes are named after the inventor of the ode, Pindar or Pindarus, the great Greek lyric poet. These odes.are written in complicated meters and elaborate stanzas. They have a formal introduction, a middle, and an end. The Horatian ode, exemplified by Andrew Marvell’s “An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland” only has one stanza pattern : aabb with two four-foot lines followed by two three-foot lines. The final ode type is the irregular ode, which has no metrical or stanzaic rules. The defining character of an ode then is not its structure but its content. Odes are marked by their lyrical verse and the emotion they evoke about a singular subject. John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn” are two of the most widely studied odes.
A sonnet, meaning “little song,” is a widely loved form of poetry. It is a fourteen-line lyric poem written in iambic pentameter. There are two types of sonnets: Italian (Petrachan) and English (Shakespearean). The Italian sonnet has two stanzas. The first is eight lines with an abbaabba rhyme scheme and introduces the topic of the poem. The second is six lines with either a cdecde or cdcdcd rhyme scheme and brings the poem to its resolution. The English sonnet consists of three quatrains and a rhyming couplet. The quatrains may present more than one situation that reaches resolution in the final couplet.