Poetry 101 : Let's Break it Down

I apologize for not chiming in earlier - I just hadn't noticed this thread until now (it was mostly posted during a holiday weekend for me - Dragon Boat Festival.)

So, two things: when I have used the term Formalism here, I was referring purely to Formal Poetry, not to any school of criticism. In other words, what I meant to say was "Let's spend a week or so writing and talking about sonnets (or haiku, tanka, sestina, roundelay, terza rima, triolet, whatever)."

And second, I find this site a very useful guide to a wide variety of verse forms, including those mostly used in English and some better suited to other languages.

Examples: I

kdnxdr said:

Would anyone be interested in posting a poem where the scansion is marked and a meterical analysis is given with it?

Click to expand...

I think I'd rather give a few examples - too boring to do the meter for a whole poem. I'll use ones that should be easy to find online in case you want to see the whole thing. I'll use capitals to show stresses and slashes to separate feet.

Let's start with Shakespere:

my MIS/tress' EYES/ are NO/thing LIKE/ the SUN/
CORal / is FAR/ more RED/ than HER/ lips' RED/
if SNOW/ be WHITE/ why THEN/ her BREASTS/ are DUN;/
if HAIR/ be WIRES,/ black WIRES/ grow ON/ her HEAD./

First, a note about the poem in general: it's a sonnet, with 14 rhyming lines. Second, it's (as you might guess) a Shakespearean sonnet - not because Fair Will wrote it, but because it has the rhyme scheme he made famous. You can see the rhymes above are abab - that is the first and third lines rhyme and so do the 2nd and 4th. The full poem goes abab/cdcd/efef/gg - the second and third stanzas also have 1st and 3rd and 2ns and 4th lines rhyming, but not the same rhymes as the 1st stanza so we use different letters. The final couple has two rhyming lines.

Next you can see this is pentameter - five feet per line. (Easy, just count the slashes. You can also see that in general it's iambic - each line goes
daDAH daDAH daDAH daDAH daDAH.

But wait - look again at that second line. Does Shakespeare mean us to read the first word as corAL? Of course not - he's sneakily slipped a trochee (DAHda) wolf in among the iamb lambs. This kind of thing is not at all uncommon - see Medievalist's note about Keats ending lines with spondees. You need to be careful with it, though, and mixing metric feet is definitely more an art than a science. I think the best way to figure out whether a metered poem works is to read it aloud - can you speak the words normally without feeling like you're forcing them?

This is getting long: I'll put another couple of examples in separate posts.

Let's switch from Shakespeare to Poe:

It was MA/ny and MA/ny a YEAR/ aGO,/
In a KING/dom BY/ the SEA,/
That a MAID/en there LIVED/ whom YOU/ may KNOW/
By the NAME/ of AN/nabelle LEE;/
And this MAID/en she LIVED/ with NO/ other THOUGHT/
Than to LOVE/ and be LOVED/ by me./

This one is a lot harder to classify; you can see it's much less regular than the sonnet. Nevertheless, it has a readily identifiable and regular meter. As it also tells a story, I think I'd call it a narrative ballad. (Note to self: Now that would be a fun topic for our Formalist workshop, especially with so many storytellers here!)

These lines are alternating tetrameter (4 feet) and trimeter (3'). They could also be written as heptameter (7') lines:
It was MA/ny and MA/ny a YEAR/ aGO,/ in a KING/dom by the SEA,/
That a MAID/en there LIVED/ whom YOU/ may KNOW/ by the NAME/ of AN/nabelle LEE;/

Longer lines were commoner in Poe's time than now; I got the version posted above off the web so am not sure whether the line breaks are Poe's (I think they are, actually.)

Poe is also doing that meter switching thing, swapping anapests (dadaDAH) and iambs with a liberal hand. He does seem a bit more likely to end lines with anapests. But it works - as this is one my mom read to me when I was little, I can vouch for the smoothness of the singsong lines. (There's another way to check your rhymes and meters: read 'em to a little kid. Or if the content is inappropriate, to a baby too young to understand. If it works out, you probably have it right.)

Medievalist wrote that iambic pentameter is the most common meter in English. It is, by far - let's look at some very different things done with it:

The first stanza of Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn:

Thou still unravished bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Three stanzas of Dylan Thomas:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

I haven't marked the meter here bcause I'm lazy and I hope you can see it by now. These are very different moods, and in fact different forms. Keats' piece is an ode: a form that includes a wide variety of variants and in fact encompasses several other forms, but every line rhymes with at least one other rhyme (if you give Keats a pass on Arkady / ecstasy) and each stanza is the same length. Also, I may be wrong here, but I think odes are generally to or in honor of a particular thing or person, as with this one or Keats' Ode to a Nightingale. This particular ode is very calm - in fact I found myself reciting the first few lines to myself, over and over, as I wandered around the quiet and ruined Acropolis. Somewhat ravished it may be, but "silence and slow time" suit it perfectly.

Dylan Thomas's poem has nothing in common with Keats' ode except the meter and a rigid rhyme scheme. It rages, as the words say, It is probably the most famous vilanelle in the English language; I've included three stanzas here so that you can see how the first and third lines in the first stanza are reused alternately as the final line of each following stanza.

But still:
Thou STILL/ unRAV/ished BRIDE/ of QUI/etNESS,/
Do NOT/ go GEN/tle IN/to THAT/ good NIGHT,/

Don't ever make the mistake of thinking a fixed rhyme and meter limit what you can say or the moods you can convey. It's juggling: you have to get the meter and the sense bot exactly right despite sometimes-conflicting demands. But in my opinion, when you do get it right you have something powerful enough to explode your reader's mind. I'll let Keats have the last word:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific - and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise -
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Final note on above posts: Despite a certain tendency to lecture (oh, you noticed?) I am not an academic. So I apologize in advance for any mistakes in the above posts, but not at all for their casual and subjective tone.

Okay, kid, since Dichroic sent me here, you can blame him! Heh, okay, the info in this thread is very good. There is a lot to absorb and unless you are a bit anal, it might also put off the newbie to formalistic stylin'! That said, this is what I've often done with those that wish to practice and hone their iambic skill. As noted in the 'other thread', I like to intro iambic meter with 'blank verse' type poetry. That is, putting only stress on learning about sounds and patterns while eschewing any issues re the rhyme. Blank verse consists of lines of iambic pentameter, but without end rhymes. Sooooo, what I've done is to start a Quatrain exercise in which some one such as myself starts with 4 lines of IP and then those that wish to learn, answer in form. It CAN be interesting both in what resolves re poetry as well as shoring up your metrics. It isn't that hard and 4 lines are easy to run the scansion on. I'd usually put up my Q and wait for an answer. Once I received them, I'd run the scansion and if it was pretty darn close, note the glitch and let the poster fix the line(s) in question before moving forward. In this way, you get both some inspiration and practice. No pressure to complete anything other than to have a passion to learn and try. Doing this enough will show you the patterns and along the way, discussion is born wherein such subtleties as regional accents can be explained, diphthongs, and even why one should only START with the dictionary re stress and not use it as your Bible. A line of verse/conversation is alive with intent and the dictionary is static. Anyway, let me know and I'll post you up a Q for your very own to work on. If I'm intruding, let me know as I'm not trying to step on any toes.


BrokenSword

will KID take UP the CHALLenge? QUEStions RISE
to SHOW iAMbic TENdenCIES can FLY.
it's NOT as HARD as OTHers THINK, i THINK,
unLESS you START with SAPPhics -- THEN you'll DIE!