Elements of Poetry

When you read a poem, pay attention to some basic ideas:

Voice (Who is speaking? How are they speaking?)

Stanzas (how lines are grouped)

Sound (includes rhyme, but also many other patterns)

Rhythm (what kind of "beat" or meter does the poem have?)

Figures of speech (many poems are full of metaphors and other figurative language)

Form (there are standard types of poem)

 

Voice

A lyric poem is one that expresses the feelings and emotions of the poet. It often uses first person pronouns (I, me, my, we, our, us, mine, ours, etc.) Sometimes there are no personal pronouns but it is clearly a personal observation by the writer.

A narrative poem tells a story. The poet recounts something that happens, but is not part of the story. It may be humorous, epic, or even nonsense. It starts the narrative immediately, using the words and rhythm to set a mood and show what kind of story it will be. Ballads use the narrative voice.

Apostrophe talks to something that can't answer (a bee, the moon, a tree) and is good for wondering, asking, or offering advice. Mask puts on the identity of someone or something else, and speaks for it. Conversation is a dialogue between two voices and often asks us to guess who the voices are.

Stanza

A stanza is a group within a poem which may have two or many lines.

2 lines - couplet
3 lines - tercet
4 lines - quatrain
5 lines - quintet
6 lines - sestet
7 lines - septet
8 lines - octave

Couplets, tercets, and quatrains are the building blocks of poetry and longer stanzas are made up of variations on them.

Some poems are made only of couplets--two lines that rhyme, one after the other, usually equal in length. When one couplet makes a whole poem, it is called a closed couplet. Some poems are mde of tercets. If they use only one end-rhyme sound, they are called triplets. The quatrain is the most widely used form. Rhyming patterns can vary. A pattern of two rhyming lines surrounded by two other rhyming lines is called envelope verse. Quintets can be made of patterns of couplets and tercets. A sestet may be made of three couplets, a couplet and a quatrain, two tercets, or other patterns.

Sound

One of the most important things poems do is play with sound. That doesn't just mean rhyme. It means many other things. The first poems were memorized and recited, not written down, so how it sounds is very important in poetry.

Rhyme - Rhyme means sounds agree. "Rhyme" usually means end rhymes (words at the end of a line). They give balance and please the ear. There are perfect rhymes (synonyms: complete, full, true, or exact) and off rhymes (synonyms: half, near, imperfect, partial, or slant), which have vowels or consonants in common.

If you end a line with a stress, it's called "masculine" rhyme, and if you end it with an unstressed syllable, it's "feminine" rhyme. An example of "feminine" rhyme is this couplet from the Black-Eyed Peas' "Where Is The Love?" :

I feel the weight of the world on my shoulder
As I'm gettin' older, y'all, people gets colder

The stress in this rhyme is on the first syllable of "shoulder" and "colder." Later in the same song, here is an example of "masculine" rhyme:

Can you practice what you preach
And would you turn the other cheek

Repetition - Repetition occurs when a word or phrase used more than once. Repetition can create music, a pattern that appeals to the ears. It can serve as an aid to remembering a poem, can emphasize a concept or an action. It should be something worth repeating. It provides sound and thought patterns, even when there is no end rhyme. One form of repetition is the refrain, a whole line repeated.

Refrain - Lines repeated in the same way. Lines that change a word or two are called incremental refrains.

Alliteration - Alliteration is the repetition of the same sound in words. Alliteration that begins a word is initial alliteration, and alliteration within a word is called hidden or internal alliteration. Listen for alliteration rather than depending on your eyes.

Onomatopoeia - Onomatopoeia means words or phrases that sound like the things they are describing. (hiss, zoom, bow-wow, etc.)

Consonance - When consonants agree in words. (fast, lost)

Assonance - When vowels agree in words. (peach, tree)

Rhythm

Meter (or metrics) - When you speak, you don't say everything in a steady tone like a hum--you'd sound funny. Instead, you stress parts of words. You say different parts of words with different volume, and your voice rises and falls as if you were singing a song. Mostly, we don't notice we're doing it. Poetry in English is often made up of poetic units or feet. The most common feet are the iamb, the trochee, the anapest, and the dactyl. Each foot has one stress or beat.

Iamb - the most common foot in English poetry, a rising foot like the anapest, made of two syllables with a stress (accent) on the second syllable: to/day, this / clock. Sometimes the foot is one word, sometimes two.

Anapest - a rising foot like the iamb, with two unaccented or unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable. It is a playful meter: dis/a/gree, through / the / house.

Trochee - a falling foot like the dactyl, with the accent on the first syllable followed by an unaccented beat: Sun/ny, of / the.

Dactyl - a falling foot like the trochee, with the first syllable accented or stressed and the next two syllables unstressed. El/e/phant, This / is / the.

Depending on what kind of poem you're writing, each line can have anywhere from one to many stressed beats, otherwise known as feet. Most common are:

Trimeter (three beats)

Tetrameter (four beats)

Pentameter (five beats)

You also sometimes see dimeter (two beats) and hexameter (six beats) but lines longer than that can't be said in one breath, so poets tend to avoid them.

Check out Fun with Iambic Pentameter at http://www.sp.uconn.edu/~mwh95001/iambic.html

Figures of speech

Otherwise known as figurative language. The most well-known are simile, metaphor, and personification. They are used to help with the task of "telling, not showing."

Simile - a comparison of one thing to another, using the words "like," "as," or "as though."

Metaphor - comparing one thing to another by saying that one thing is another thing. Metaphors are stronger than similes, but they are more difficult to see.

Personification - speaking as if something were human when it's not.

Poetic forms

There are a number of common poetic forms. People who are familiar with poetry can usually tell what the form of a poem is when they first look at it. The form tells the reader what to expect from the poem, and the person who writes the poem can "play" with the form in interesting ways.

Ballad - story told in verse. It tells about a dramatic event, without much detail or setting. Action is very important in a ballad. A ballad stanza is usually a simple quatrain (four-line stanza) or octave, and there is often a repetitive refrain. Ballads are often written in alternating lines of four (tetrameter) and three (trimeter) beats. As you can guess, this form started out as a song. An example of a traditional Scottish ballad is Lord Randal at http://www.bartleby.com/243/66.html

Haiku - a short poem with seventeen syllables, usually written in three lines with five syllables in the first line, seven in the second, and five in the third. It must refer to something in nature or use a "season word." "hai-ku" means "beginning phrase." The present tense is used, the subject is one thing happening now, and words are not repeated. It does not rhyme. The origin of the haiku is Japanese. A famous haiku writer was Basho, and a page about it is at Haiku for People at http://www.toyomasu.com/haiku/

Cinquain - a five-line poem with two syllables in the first line, four in the second, six in the third, eight in the fourth, and two in the fifth. It expresses one image or thought, in one or possibly two sentences. Thomas Greer's cinquains are good examples (http://www.ahapoetry.com/cinqtg.htm)

Villanelle - a 19-line poem with five tercets and one quatrain at the end. Two of the lines are repeated alternately at the ends of the tercets, and finish off the poem: the first line and the third line of the first tercet. Although it sounds very complicated, it's like a song or a dance and easy to see once you've looked at a villanelle. Right now this is my favorite poetic form. One of the best-known villanelles is Dylan Thomas' poem for his dying father, Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night (http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15377)

Limerick - A five-line poem, usually meant to be funny. The rhythm is anapests. Lines 1, 2, and 5 rhyme with one another, and lines 3 and 4 rhyme with one another. Lines 1, 2, and 5 have three feet, lines 3 and 4 have two feet. An iamb can be substituted for an anapest in the first foot of any line. The last foot can add another unstressed beat for the rhyming effect. An example of a limerick is at http://www.bartleby.com/65/li/limerick.html

Sonnet - There are different types of sonnet. The most familiar to us is made of three quatrains and ends with a couplet. They tend to be complicated and elegant. William Shakespeare wrote the most well-known sonnets. http://www.ludweb.com/poetry/sonnets/

Free verse (or open form) - Much modern poetry does not obviously rhyme and doesn't have a set meter. However, sound and rhythm are often still important, and it is still often written in short lines for a good reason. A line can be like a musical phrase or a single breath. There may be a pause after each line. Patterns of syllables, sounds, meter, and repetition all have something to do with the meaning of the poem. "The Red Wheelbarrow" by William Carlos Williams is a famous non-rhyming poem. http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/83.html

Concrete poetry (pattern or shape poetry) is a picture poem, in which the visual shape of the poem contributes to its meaning. There is a website devoted to Concrete Poetry at http://www.gardendigest.com/concrete/