I for one rejoice greatly at the amount of poetry on these forums. I wondered if it might be helpful to start a little thread considering the elements of poetry in order to encourage others to pitch in and have a go, because poetry is highly expressive and highly fun!
The first question might be, do you want to write a structured poem or in ‘free’ verse?
‘Of course, free verse is much easier than structured verse, because you don’t have to worry about the structure, right?’
Wrong. In structured verse most of the work is done for you by the structure, the reader is drawn along by the clickety clack of the verses. Free verse poets have to make every single word count, drawing the reader through the poem by the sheer beauty and power of the words they choose. There are some fantastic free verse poets here, and I hope that they will chip in and give us the benefit of their experience.
Secondly, a good entry into poetry is comic verse, where you can take liberties. It is very difficult to use free verse to comic effect, in my humble opinion, so you are heading into the stratosphere of emotive writing when you pick the free verse option, and to illustrate this point just look at Siss' latest offering, 'Daydreams and Nightmares.'
http://www.cruxforums.com/xf/threads/daydreams-and-nightmares.4527/
I’ll stick with structured verse, therefore!
There is much that could be written about poetry, but the elements are metre and rhyme.
Metre is the rhythm of the lines, specifically it is the number of beats in the line.
Here’s a line of structured poetry, from Casabianca by Felicia Dorothea Hemans (the poem is better known than the poet)
The boy stood on the burning deck.
Count the beats and you should come up with 8.
‘So I just get 8 syllables in a line and I’m home and dry. Right?’
Not quite, because in addition to the number of syllables the line has a rhythm:
The BOY stood ON the BURNing DECK
The syllables are not equal, some are stressed. Dee-DAH dee-DAH dee-DAH dee-DAH. (If you’re interested, each pair of syllables is called a ‘foot’. A foot which stresses the second syllable is called an ‘iamb’ and a foot which stresses the first is a ‘trochee’. Four feet together, like this, is called ‘quadrameter’, this line is therefore iambic quadrameter. But you can ignore all that stuff for now.)
So you do have to pay some attention to the natural rhythm of words. You can see, for instance, that you couldn’t make ‘burning’ the last word in the line without pronouncing it ‘burNING’ which sounds false.
And that’s the key. It’s as simple as that. Does the line ‘sound’ right or not? As we say ‘does it scan’? Or are you forcing stress on syllables that don’t normally take stress?
There are various tricks to help you get your metre into order.
Right ho, just a few thoughts about rhyme, and then I’ll shut up and give way to the real experts!
Let’s have a look at the rest of the first verse of Ms Heman’s poem:
The boy stood on the burning deck.
Whence all but he had fled;
The flame that lit the battle's wreck.
Shone round him o'er the dead
So the second and fourth lines are shorter, just six beats, and that makes them a bit punchier, and this 8.6.8.6 structure is so beloved of poets and songwriters that it is called ‘common metre’ or ‘ballad metre’.
These are the simplest rhymes, ‘deck’ and ‘wreck’ rhyme perfectly, as do ‘fled’ and ‘dead’, in a rhyming structure that we can describe as a,b,a,b.
But here’s a rather naughty caricature:
The boy stood on the burning deck.
His feet were covered in blisters.
He'd burnt the socks right off his feet
And had to wear his sister's.
I don’t know about you, but I think that is quite funny. It emphasises my point about comedy verse. Whoever wrote that has completely messed up the metre, the first and third lines don’t rhyme, and yet it works! You can’t sing it (try ‘the House of the Rising Sun’) but it brings a smile to the lips.
It does also instruct us a little, firstly that the ‘key’ rhymes are those at the end of lines two and four, so it is perfectly acceptable, if you struggle with rhymes, or if you are writing a long ballad, or if you simply prefer it, to ignore the ‘a’ rhymes in common metre.
Secondly, it illustrates another way of rhyming, and another important point. The rhyme must be on the stressed syllable. The ‘ters’ of ‘blisters’ may rhyme with ‘hers’ but there’s no way you could end the last line with ‘hers’, or even with a two syllable word that ends –ers (try substituting ‘mother’s’ for ‘sister’s’)
But don’t be a slave to a rhyme. Often there is a genuinely limited choice of rhymes available and if you’re not careful you end up twisting the poem just to get a rhyme. (For a great example of that, used to hilarious comedy effect, look no further than W.S. Gilbert’s ‘Modern Major-General’)
Think about ‘phononyms’ – these are words which do not rhyme perfectly, but where the stressed syllable sounds very similar to that of the word you want to rhyme:
She wasn’t quite so helpful now
The soldiers fought to hold her down;
And beware of ‘identicals’
A girl with golden blond hair
Had lost all her clothes, and was bare
She thought ‘what a bore’
When she heard a loud roar
And beheld a bad tempered brown bear.
Even in a limerick, the rhyming of ‘bare’ and ‘bear’ is disappointing (though the alliteration in the last line has merit – but alliteration is another story.)
Final thought – you can’t hold every word in your head, it is not ‘cheating’ to use a rhyming dictionary or a website like ‘rhymezone’.
So go on, have a go. Feel free to use this thread to play on!
The first question might be, do you want to write a structured poem or in ‘free’ verse?
‘Of course, free verse is much easier than structured verse, because you don’t have to worry about the structure, right?’
Wrong. In structured verse most of the work is done for you by the structure, the reader is drawn along by the clickety clack of the verses. Free verse poets have to make every single word count, drawing the reader through the poem by the sheer beauty and power of the words they choose. There are some fantastic free verse poets here, and I hope that they will chip in and give us the benefit of their experience.
Secondly, a good entry into poetry is comic verse, where you can take liberties. It is very difficult to use free verse to comic effect, in my humble opinion, so you are heading into the stratosphere of emotive writing when you pick the free verse option, and to illustrate this point just look at Siss' latest offering, 'Daydreams and Nightmares.'
http://www.cruxforums.com/xf/threads/daydreams-and-nightmares.4527/
I’ll stick with structured verse, therefore!
There is much that could be written about poetry, but the elements are metre and rhyme.
Metre is the rhythm of the lines, specifically it is the number of beats in the line.
Here’s a line of structured poetry, from Casabianca by Felicia Dorothea Hemans (the poem is better known than the poet)
The boy stood on the burning deck.
Count the beats and you should come up with 8.
‘So I just get 8 syllables in a line and I’m home and dry. Right?’
Not quite, because in addition to the number of syllables the line has a rhythm:
The BOY stood ON the BURNing DECK
The syllables are not equal, some are stressed. Dee-DAH dee-DAH dee-DAH dee-DAH. (If you’re interested, each pair of syllables is called a ‘foot’. A foot which stresses the second syllable is called an ‘iamb’ and a foot which stresses the first is a ‘trochee’. Four feet together, like this, is called ‘quadrameter’, this line is therefore iambic quadrameter. But you can ignore all that stuff for now.)
So you do have to pay some attention to the natural rhythm of words. You can see, for instance, that you couldn’t make ‘burning’ the last word in the line without pronouncing it ‘burNING’ which sounds false.
And that’s the key. It’s as simple as that. Does the line ‘sound’ right or not? As we say ‘does it scan’? Or are you forcing stress on syllables that don’t normally take stress?
There are various tricks to help you get your metre into order.
- Turn two syllables into one. Here’s a famous example: ‘Twas the night before Christmas.’
- Get a thesaurus. Chances are, if you look through the rich variety of synonyms in the English language, you will find a word that fits better into your line than the one you’re thinking of.
- Think about the whole phrase. Believe that there’s a way of saying it that fits the metre you need. So, if I wanted to write ‘Think about the whole phrase’ in the eight beat form of our example, I might come up with ‘Consider how the whole phrase works.’ ConSIDder HOW the WHOLE phrase WORKS. Simples! And ‘consider’ is a lovely word, so much better than ‘think about’, even though it has the same number of syllables.
Right ho, just a few thoughts about rhyme, and then I’ll shut up and give way to the real experts!
Let’s have a look at the rest of the first verse of Ms Heman’s poem:
The boy stood on the burning deck.
Whence all but he had fled;
The flame that lit the battle's wreck.
Shone round him o'er the dead
So the second and fourth lines are shorter, just six beats, and that makes them a bit punchier, and this 8.6.8.6 structure is so beloved of poets and songwriters that it is called ‘common metre’ or ‘ballad metre’.
These are the simplest rhymes, ‘deck’ and ‘wreck’ rhyme perfectly, as do ‘fled’ and ‘dead’, in a rhyming structure that we can describe as a,b,a,b.
But here’s a rather naughty caricature:
The boy stood on the burning deck.
His feet were covered in blisters.
He'd burnt the socks right off his feet
And had to wear his sister's.
I don’t know about you, but I think that is quite funny. It emphasises my point about comedy verse. Whoever wrote that has completely messed up the metre, the first and third lines don’t rhyme, and yet it works! You can’t sing it (try ‘the House of the Rising Sun’) but it brings a smile to the lips.
It does also instruct us a little, firstly that the ‘key’ rhymes are those at the end of lines two and four, so it is perfectly acceptable, if you struggle with rhymes, or if you are writing a long ballad, or if you simply prefer it, to ignore the ‘a’ rhymes in common metre.
Secondly, it illustrates another way of rhyming, and another important point. The rhyme must be on the stressed syllable. The ‘ters’ of ‘blisters’ may rhyme with ‘hers’ but there’s no way you could end the last line with ‘hers’, or even with a two syllable word that ends –ers (try substituting ‘mother’s’ for ‘sister’s’)
But don’t be a slave to a rhyme. Often there is a genuinely limited choice of rhymes available and if you’re not careful you end up twisting the poem just to get a rhyme. (For a great example of that, used to hilarious comedy effect, look no further than W.S. Gilbert’s ‘Modern Major-General’)
Think about ‘phononyms’ – these are words which do not rhyme perfectly, but where the stressed syllable sounds very similar to that of the word you want to rhyme:
She wasn’t quite so helpful now
The soldiers fought to hold her down;
And beware of ‘identicals’
A girl with golden blond hair
Had lost all her clothes, and was bare
She thought ‘what a bore’
When she heard a loud roar
And beheld a bad tempered brown bear.
Even in a limerick, the rhyming of ‘bare’ and ‘bear’ is disappointing (though the alliteration in the last line has merit – but alliteration is another story.)
Final thought – you can’t hold every word in your head, it is not ‘cheating’ to use a rhyming dictionary or a website like ‘rhymezone’.
So go on, have a go. Feel free to use this thread to play on!
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