THE LANGUAGE OF POETRY: SOUND, RHYTHM, AND SHAPE

Source: Bradford, Richard ed. 1996: Introducing Literary Studies. London: Prentice Hall.

1. What is poetry?

 Metre, rhyme and the use of the poetic line involve the organization of the material of language
(sound, emphasis, rhythm) in a way that is impractical and arbitrary.
 Metre, rhyme and sound pattern, the poetic line… they all interfere with the delivery of the
message and draw attention to the medium through which it is delivered: language becomes
self referential.
 They obstruct and complicate the production of meaning by foregrounding the material of
language at the expense of transparency and clarity.
 Metaphor: it is used to create a world with its own internalized relations, which echo but do not
replicate the world outside the text.

2. The poetic line

In most poems written before the 20th century the line is constructed from a combination of two or
more of the following elements:

 A specified and predictable number of syllables.

Most commonly used example: the pentameter (a ten-syllable line)
 A metrical pattern consisting of the relation between the stress of adjacent syllables.
Most frequently used metrical pattern in English: the iambic foot (unstressed syllable + stressed
syllable; for example: defeat)
 Rhyme: repetition of the sound of a single syllable at the end of a line.
 Alliteration: the repetition of clusters of similar vowel or consonant-sounds within individual
lines and across sequences of lines.

3. Metre

 The iambic foot: the commonest type of foot in all English verse because it fits the prevailing
natural pattern of English words and phrases.
 The iambic pentameter:
o The most frequently used line in English poetry
o It consists of ten syllables with the even syllables stressed more emphatically than the
odd ones.
Example (from Pope):

˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯
To make | the soul | by ten|der strokes | of art

o Main examples:
 Shakespeare’s blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameters):

...bid me leap, rather than marry Paris,

From off the battlements of yonder tower;
Or walk in thievish ways; or bid me lurk
Where serpents are; chain me with roaring bears;
Or shut me nightly in a charnel-house,
O’er covered quite with dead men’s rattling bones,
With reeky shanks and yellow chapless skulls;
Or bid me go into a new-made grave,
And hide me with a dead man and his shroud;
(from Romeo and Juliet)

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  Milton’s Paradise Lost:

Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit

Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat.

 Wordsworth’s The Prelude:

O there is blessing in this gentle breeze,

A visitant that while it fans my cheek
Doth seem half-conscious of the joy it brings
From the green fields, and from yon azure sky.

4. Rhyme and the stanza

Rhyme binds lines together into larger structural units: the stanza.

Types of stanzas:

 The couplet (2 lines): a a

 The quatrain (4 lines): a b a b
 Free verse
o No regular meter or line length.
o It depends on natural speech rhythms and the counterpoint of stressed and unstressed
syllables.
 Blank verse
o Unrhymed five-stress lines (iambic pentameters)
o Particularly used in drama
 The sonnet (14 lines):
o Petrarchan: abba abba cdc dcd
o Shakespearean: three iambic pentameter quatrains followed by an iambic pentameter
couplet
 The ode
o The most flexible and variable stanzaic form
o An open flexible structure
o Particularly used by the Romantic poets as a medium for personal reflection. It rarely
tells a particularly story. It usually offers an apparently random sequence of questions,
hypotheses and comparisons.
o Example: John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1820)

THOU still unravish'd 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?

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5. Figures: The Metaphor

 The basic figure in poetry

 A figure of speech in which one thing is described in terms of another. A comparison is usually
implicit, whereas in simile it is explicit.
 I.A. Richards coined the words “tenor” and “vehicle” to explain it.
o Tenor: the principal subject of a metaphor
o Vehicle: the analogue carried over to the subject from a different frame of reference
Example (from Wordsworth): “the sky rejoices in the morning’s birth”
o Tenor: the speaker’s perception of the sky and the morning
o Vehicle: the activities of rejoicing and giving birth

6. Syntax and diction (vocabulary used by a writer)

 Any word, clause, phrase, grammatical habit or locution used in non-poetic language can be used
in poetry. Their presence within the poem will alter their familiar non-poetic function.
No matter where the words come from or what social or political affiliations they carry, they are
always appropriated and acted upon by the internal structures of poetry.
 ENJAMBMENT: when syntax crosses the space between two poetic lines. The implied pause at
the end of a line might suggest a slight indecision, encode a tension between two possible
meanings, etc.
Ex.: Mimi Khalvati, “Don't Ask me, Love, for that First Love”

How wrong I was. What had summer

to do with sorrow in full spate?
Every rosebud, every flower
I passed, stood at a stranger’s gate.

Weaving through out towns, centuries

of raw silk, brocade and velvet
have swilled the streets in blood. Bodies,
ripe with sores in lanes and markets,

are paying with their lives. But I

had little time for the world’s wars,
love was war enough. In your sky,
your eyes, were all my falling stars.

7. Who’s speaking?

 Possible speakers
o The poet himself/herself
o The poetic persona
 Interpretation
o We can draw parallels between the speaker and what we know of the life, the
historical, social, even psychological condition of the poet.
o We can interpret the poetic persona as a construction of the poem’s own internalized
system of images and stylistic devices.
 The poem’s deictic features (from the Greek, “pointing” or “showing”):
Much of what we know of the speaker of a poem is provided by the poem itself. The information
which enables us to construct a mental picture of the speaker is known as the poem’s deictic
features.

8. Themes (not in Introducing Literary Studies)

 Comment on the themes dealt with by the poem

 Relate them to the particular formal aspects (stanza, rhyme, diction, figures of speech, etc.) used
in the text (for example, a poem about war such as Herbert Read’s “The Happy Warrior” [1919]
is full of words that contribute to the dehumanization of the soldier described in the text).