Poetry

C

Rhyme

In addition to creating balanced rhythms or cadence through the use of meter, poets give richness to their language through shadings of sound, orchestrating the musical quality of vowel and consonants through the words they use. Perhaps the most familiar form of sound patterning is end-rhyme, a similarity of sound carried by word endings. It began as an aspect of oral poetry (poetry composed, transmitted, or performed orally rather than through writing), and was probably intended to help people memorize poems. Over centuries written verse forms developed using rhyme in set patterns known as rhyme schemes. In the following typical English ballad unrhymed and end-rhymed lines alternate:

In some cases, rather than making use of a full end-rhyme such as “me” and “sea,” poets instead employ off-rhyme or slant rhyme for a strange unsettling effect, as 19th-century American poet Emily Dickinson does with “One” and “Stone” in the example below.

Wilfred Owen, a 20th-century English poet, expresses the senselessness of war through the use of slant rhymes:

Although end-rhyme is the most common form of rhyme, poets such as Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, and Sylvia Plath intricately crafted their work by embedding additional internal rhymes, full or slant, at various points.

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D

Repetition of Words and Refrains

Repetition of lines and phrases is a common aspect of oral tradition, as will be seen in examples below. Later written forms also repeat lines for a hypnotic, deeply musical effect. John Ashbery, a 20th-century American poet known for his poems that seem to keep from explaining themselves or coming to a decisive ending, uses the circular form of the pantoum, from Malay folk poetry, to express confusion. The repeated lines are in boldface type.

In “One Art,” American poet Elizabeth Bishop varies the French Renaissance villanelle form by estabalishing lines in her opening stanza that will be repeated later in the poem.

As the poem goes on, her claim that loss does not matter takes on an air of desperate–and unconvincing–insistence:

As the speaker repeats the earlier lines they lose their authority.

In the 15th century French poet François Villon used repetition to a similarly bitter effect. Writing in strict 14th-century ballade form (not to be confused with the English ballad), of which he was a master, he offers a string of self-contradicting statements—

—ending with a claim for the cool-headedness of lovers, a group famous for irrationality. This final line repeats in five successive stanzas, reinforcing its irony:

E

Metaphor and Simile

Among the most important figurative (as opposed to literal or factual) uses of language, metaphor and simile make comparisons as a way of illuminating or developing meaning. Metaphor equates two things that are not the same, while simile says two unlike things are like each other. At their simplest, these figures of speech (underlined below) may be used in a descriptive way to emphasize qualities, as in this Navajo praise poem:

The classical Greek philosopher Aristotle in his Poetics (about 330 BC) declared metaphor one of the highest achievements of poetic style: “it is the token of genius. For the right use of metaphor means an eye for resemblances.” In the following examples, however, metaphor and simile go beyond physical resemblances to compare complex states of feeling. The metaphors in the first example are not even stated. The speaker compares a time in her life to a baby bird’s life inside an egg, and then compares the egg to the oval of an ellipse.

In the following example both metaphors and similes are used, although sometimes the words for the comparison are implied rather than stated. The use of both stated and unstated metaphors and similes helps communicate unexpressed feelings.

The comparison between “light” and “defect” is explicit in the word “like”. There is also an implicit comparison between “daylight” and something “legal” (a legal act?) in the second line. In the poem below, a woman is compared to a “shot glass of vodka,” and “a field of poppies,” with the word “like”. But there are also underlying metaphors that are unstated: vodka burns (like fire) in the throat and poppies burn (like fire) because of their red color. Both are intoxicating drugs (like the woman in the poem) that distort reality.

Unstated metaphors can have a surprising emotional effect on readers when the poet uses an implied comparison to invent an image, as is the case with these lines by 20^th-century Canadian poet and novelist Michael Ondaatje:

In the 17th century, metaphysical poets, who are called this for their intellectual poetry about truths beyond the physical world, favored extended metaphors, or conceits, that act as links in a descriptive chain. For example, American poet Anne Bradstreet’s conceit below makes many comparisons between a book and a child.

Metaphor tends to encompass other poetic devices as well, in particular imagery, the use of descriptive language to create pictures in the reader’s mind.

III

The First Poetry

Poetry is an ancient art, with its origins well before those of recorded history (about 3000 BC). The oldest surviving remnants come from the Near East, dating as far back as 2600 BC. The Assyro-Babylonian, Sumerian, and Egyptian cultures all contributed to this fascinating and fragmentary store of work. The remnants are preserved in cuneiform, an ancient wedge-shaped writing on clay tablets, or on papyrus paper stenciled with hieroglyphs, characters used in picture writing. These early poems included praises of gods and heroes, chants (songs that repeat the same note or words), wisdom literature (lists of advice and truths from elders or other authorities), magic charms, and laments to mourn or inspire pity. All these poems were for the most part religious in nature. One of the chief structural characteristics was the use of recurrent phrases or refrains:

Evidence suggests that much early poetry was intended to be sung, at times with musical accompaniment. Longer works existed as well. With its earliest portions dating as far back as 1200 BC, the Hebrew Bible, known to Christians as the Old Testament, stands as one of the world's oldest and most influential poetic works. The even older Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh (about 2000 BC), contains an account of a flood strikingly similar to that of Genesis in the Bible. The oldest poem attributed to a specific author is the “Hymn to Inanna” (about 2300 BC) by Enheduanna, a high priestess and daughter of Sumerian king Sargon I. Here she describes the destructive-creative fury of the fertility goddess Inanna in protecting her worshipers:

These traces suggest the presence of a widespread oral poetry tradition aimed at providing pleasure and offering prayer, as well as fulfilling the important social function of commemorating lives, battles, and historical events. Within the warrior culture that helped shape much early Greek poetry, this final purpose was particularly crucial. In a preliterate world lacking many means of remembering a person’s story after death, oral poetry took on great importance as a vehicle for awarding a kind of earthly immortality. Once passed into the “fame” of words, the hero would live forever in the minds of listeners. Poetry gained power and authority in part because it was felt to be divinely inspired. In the Greek epic tradition, exclusive to male poets as far as we know, the singer called upon the muse, a goddess, to fill him with voice as in the opening of Homer’s Iliad:

This summoning of the muse, known as invocation, implied the existence of an imaginative force outside the poet's own mind and body. In the ancient past it was believed that inspiration—a Greek word meaning literally the “taking in of breath”—was conferred through the generosity of divine beings, linking earthly humans and their brief lives to the eternal spirit of the gods. An important change in this idea of inspiration would come centuries later. With 17th-century metaphysical poets, the center of inspiration moved inward to the soul; still later, with 19th-century romantic poets, to the unconscious mind and the imagination.

Scholarly opinion has changed greatly regarding the composition of the Greek epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. For centuries, it was assumed that a poet named Homer composed the epics, memorized them, and repeated them word for word at public festivals and celebrations. In the 20th century, researchers have argued that although a poet by that name may have existed, he was simply the last—and possibly the best—in a series of oral poets giving voice to what was already a traditional story. From 1933 to 1935, classical scholars Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord observed performances by oral epic poets in Yugoslavia, noting that the poets varied their delivery each time. Rather than simply reciting the poem from memory, they embroidered and varied the poem with each repetition, making use of standard passages and phrases to describe certain characters. Scholars speculate that this oral practice may explain Homer’s repeated lines and sections as well as phrases such as ““the wine-dark sea,”” “swift-footed Achilles,” and “grey-eyed Athena.”

IV

Tradition

Poets create literary history and tradition by using and passing on poetic structures and ideas about life and art from generation to generation. Although great poetry is sometimes said to be timeless, poets think of their writing as part of history (including literary history), and they intentionally imitate earlier poets. The idea that a poem should be original is a relatively recent development, dating from English romantic poets of the early 19th century. In fact many avant-garde experimenters of the 20th century—poets seeking to break with existing conventions of poetry—have turned their attention to ancient poetries or to oral practices that continue today. The word “original” contains the word “origin—”and for the modern poet the search for new poetic forms is often a matter of looking back at the past ones. Prior to the 19th-century emphasis on the original, imitation of earlier models was not only acceptable but was the standard way of learning to write poetry and becoming a poet in other people’s eyes. Even in the New World Canadian (both French and English) and American poetry began with poets asserting their voices by writing in the forms of European and English poetry (see Canadian Literature; American Literature:Poetry).

For poets of the English Renaissance, from about 1485 to 1660, the imitation of classical Greek and Roman poets was a way of earning a place in the lineage of that early artistic and philosophical culture that had glorified the human image in art and writing. Finding their roots in this earlier era was a crucial step for the English poets. They wanted to show how their art was different than that of the medieval period that preceded the Renaissance. At that time, the medieval period was viewed as a dark age in which the glorious culture of the ancients had been lost. Over the ages many poets have found writing in traditional forms a means of “talking” to poets of the past, both to acknowledge what they have learned from them and to add their own voices to the tradition. Among poets continuing this convention in their own ways, the English late–19th- and early-20th-century poet A.E. Housman and the 20th-century Canadian experimental poet Anne Carson, both classical scholars, juxtaposed ancient and modern to jolt the reader into seeing the continuities of tradition.

Within a given culture a conventional image—an image with a long history—reminds people of thoughts, feelings, and ideas that have collected around that image over time. For example, one of the most common Western images in poetry is the moon. It is also a common image in Eastern poetry but carries different meanings. In Greek and Roman myth, in which Western culture originated, the moon was associated with the goddess Artemis (called Diana by the Romans). This hunter and virgin rejected men, preferring to roam the woods alone or with bands of female followers, all of whom were required to renounce male companionship. This association, along with the moon's shifting shapes, led to a shared understanding of the moon as an image of women’s indifference, changeability, elusiveness, and inconstancy. Even when not attached specifically to a particular woman, the image evoked a principle of change and flux that was thought of as essentially feminine. Knowledge of these conventional meanings helps a reader understand their familiar uses as well as cases in which a poem is deliberately questioning or opposing them. The modernist American poet Wallace Stevens voiced his urgent longing to step outside traditional ways of perceiving reality, to see “the moon/and not the image of the moon.” American Sylvia Plath ends her final poem, “Edge ”(1963), with a frightening reworking of the convention: “The moon has nothing to be sad about/staring from her hood of bone.//She is used to this sort of thing./Her blacks crackle and drag.”

Here, the moon's traditional changeableness hardens into a cold and uncaring aloofness. Feminist literary critics, who specialize in writing about women’s place within and outside of literary traditions, have suggested that Plath's suicide at the age of 30 may have been connected to her struggle to be too many women at once—an independent artist, a support to her poet-husband, a mother, a well-known poet, and a kind of prophet. The harshness of the moon in this poem may reflect Plath’s bitter self-condemnation. As a witness, the moon offers not sorrow or sympathy for the woman speaker in the poem, but icy indifference. While familiarity with the conventional image is not necessary to feel the power and emotional violence of this moment when we read the poem, the more we know about the social and cultural context in which it was written, the more we see in the image.

The following sections survey some of the ways that a tradition of poetry has evolved by looking at the conventions of particular poetic forms: iambic pentameter verse in English, the English sonnet, the Japanese haiku, the Persian/Arabic ghazal, the Swahili tendi, and Native American Song.

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