Poetry Versification The Principles and Practice of Writing

Poetry: Versification: The Principles and Practice of Writing Verse Poetry Unit English 1 A 2010

What is a poem? • Take 2 minutes and jot down all the elements that a work must include to be considered a poem? • What is the length? • What is the point of view? • Etc.

A Poem • A poem is a composition written for performance by the human voice. • Simultaneous engagement of eye and ear • What must your eye be attentive to? Your ear? • What a poem says or means is the result of how it is said.

My Papa’s Waltz By Theodore Roethke The whiskey on your breath Could make a small boy dizzy; But I hung on like death: Such waltzing was not easy. The hand that held my wrist Was battered on one knuckle; At every step you missed My right ear scarped a buckle. We romped until the pans Slid from the kitchen shelf; My mother’s countenance Could not unfrown itself. You beat time on my head With a palm caked hard by dirt, Then waltzed me off to bed Still clinging to your shirt.

Classification • Poetry can be classified into 3 broad categories: • Epic: a long narrative poem, frequently extending to several “books” or sections – John Milton’s Paradise Lost – Homer’s The Odyssey

Classification • Dramatic: Poetry, monologue, or dialogue, written in the voice of a character assumed by the poet – Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Ulysses – Robert Browning’s My Last Duchess

Classification • Lyric: originally, a song performed in ancient Greece to the accompaniment of a small harplike instrument called a lyre. The term is now used for any fairly short poem in the voice of a single speaker, although that speaker may sometimes quote others. • “I” in the poem is not necessarily the author.

Rhythm • The sequence of syllables (stressed and unstressed) • What we hear when we read the poem aloud

Meter • If a poem’s rhythm is structured into a recurrence of regular/approximately equal units, we call it meter • Accentual-syllabic meter: most common metrical system in English poetry – Iambic: an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable • It was/ the best/ of times/ it was/ the worst/ of times – Trochaic: a stressed followed by an unstressed syllable • London/ bridge is/ falling/ down

Meter – Anapestic: two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable • The Assyr/ ian came down/ like the wolf/ on the fold – Dactylic: a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables • Woman much/ missed, how you/ call to me, call to me

Meter – Spondaic: two successive syllables with approximately equal strong stresses • Listen!/ you hear/ the grat/ in roar – Pyrrhic: two successive unstressed or lightly stressed syllables

Meter: Line Lengths • Monometer: one foot • Diameter: two feet • Trimeter: three feet • Tetrameter: four feet • Pentameter: five feet • Hexameter: six feet • Heptameter: seven feet • Octameter: eight feet

Varying the Pattern of Poetry • An important factor in varying the pattern of a poem is the placing of its pauses, or caesurae • End stopped • Run-on lines • Enjambment: the thrust of the incompleted sentence carries on over the end of the verse line

Rhyme • End rhyme • Internal rhyme • Slant rhyme • Eye rhymes • Vowel rhyme (assonance)

Poetic Form • Blank Verse: unrhymed iambic pentameters; standard meter for Elizabethan poetic drama; no verse form is closer to the natural rhythms of spoken English • Couplet: two lines of verse, usually coupled by rhyme • Tercet: a stanza of three lines linked with a single rhyme

Poetic Form • Quatrain: a stanza of four lines, rhymed or unrhymed • The Sonnet: a poem of fourteen iambic pentameters linked by an intricate rhyme scheme • Villanelle: a French verse; five tercets rhyming aba followed by a quatrain rhyming abaa