CADI AYAD UNIVERSITY Literature classes

FACULTY OF LETTERS Prof. Iflahen

ENGLISH FILIÈRE

THE ELEMENTS OF POETRY

LITERATURE

I. WORDS

To appreciate poetry is to love words : their sounds, their meanings, even the way they feel in your
mouths when you say them. Words, even before we know what they mean, appeal to us on a
fundamental physiological level. We not only take pleasure from hearing them, but also from
saying them. The following poem, “Piano”, by D.H. Lawrence, resounds, quite literally, when
read aloud :

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;

Taking ma back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
An pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.

In spite of myself, the insidious master of song

Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cozy parlor, the tinkling piano guide.

So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamor

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 With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.

In Lawrence’s words we hear the piano, and in the piano we hear his nostalgic emotions. The
words he uses have expressed his thoughts and affected ours. None of the words is foreign to our
understanding. The poet’s words reach us across more than 70 years. His language is distinctive
and, no doubt, chosen with great care, but it is free of archaisms and flowery diction. The language
is familiar and made fresh by the way it is arranged. As students of poetry we must pay attention
not only to words themselves, but also to their contexts. We are drawn to the poem by our kinship
to the English language which, with its important literary and linguistic tradition reflecting the
more than 1500 years of history that are preserved in modern English, has become a very vital
language, preserving the grammars and the vocabularies of two major language.systems. This
distinction between Anglo-Saxon and French-Latin borrowings is one of the properties that we
must be aware of when considering the diction and the style of modern English poetry.

Besides their origins, their number of syllables (and of course their definitions !) all words have
qualities we must be sensitive to in order to appreciate the effects poets are able to create through
word choice. Poets choose their words with several considerations in mind.

• Level of formality. Although words cannot be placed into social classes, the fact
remains that some words are “proper” in some contexts and others not; some are “fancy”
and difficult, some are plain and easy to grasp. E.g., evening repast, supper, grub.
Depending upon their perceived audience, their aims, and their backgrounds, poets will
use terms that lie somewhere along this variety in formality.
• Level of concreteness and abstractness. For practical purposes, words are concrete or
abstract depending on whether or not they conjure up some kind of sensory image in
our minds. Smoke, for example, causes images of sight, smell, or even taste to enter our
minds. Smoke is concrete. Hope or liberty, conversely, create no particular sensory
images. They are abstract. In general, poets prefer concrete words because they have
the ability to affect the reader’s imagination.

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 • Level of specificity or generality. Think of the words vehicle, automobile, Chevrolet,
and Corvette. As we move from the first to the last the words become more specific,
take narrower and narrower definitions. There can be more kinds of vehicles but few
kinds of Corvettes. Specificity will tend to coincide with concreteness but the two are
not the same. Fruit is a concrete term, but plum is a specific one. Again, poets will
usually prefer specific words to general words because they are more likely to affect the
reader’s imagination.

Awareness of the context sharpens and deepens our sense of the meaning of the word and of its
significance in the whole poem. Awareness of context, as well as other properties such as sound
and grammatical function, is crucial to an understanding of what might otherwise seem “nonsense”,
as in the poem, “Jabberwocky”, by Lewis Carroll :

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock ?

Come to my arms, my beamish boy !
O frabjous day ! Callooh ! Callay !”
He chortled in his joy.

Even though we cannot define frabjous, we can, because of its context, make reasonable inferences
about it. We know it is an adjective because of its placement before the noun day. We could assume
it has a positive happy meaning because it is chortled in joy. The assumptions might be supported
by the resemblance the word bears to “happy” words like fabulous and joyous. These assumptions
lead us to the conclusion that, no mater what the denotation or dictionary definition of frabjous
might be, it has a decidedly positive connotation.

The connotation of a word refers to the range of associations the word calls into our minds. These
associations may be private or nearly universal. The denotation of dust, for instance, might be
“powdery earth capable of being suspended in air”. For one person, this word may also call up the
picture of a friend’s name written in dust on a table top. To many Christians it might, by suggesting
“earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” call up a picture of a funeral, or even the general idea
of mortality. Good poets are usually keen on choosing words charged with significant connotations.

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These connotations create density, promote economy of utterance, and serve to support or create
ideas and themes the poet is trying to convey. The tone of a poem is affected by the use of particular
suggestive words. All the elements of a poem are affected, indeed created, by the poet’s use of
words. We must consider word choice with particular care when discussing elements such as sound,
imagery, figurative language, tone, meter, rhythm, and theme. We must learn to see words in poetry
as a means to other ends.

II. IMAGERY AND FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE

Language generally calls for literal images in association to words. However, one – and especially
poets – can employ what is called figures of speech, language used in something other than the
customary way, to express the same meaning. This is what we call figurative language and it is
used to express some of the qualities linked to the image you have used. When you say that “this
man is a fox”, it means that you ascribe to the ‘man’ one or more of these qualities : meekness, bad
smell, wittiness, hypocrisy, and so forth. If your figurative description of the‘man’ proves accurate,
you may begin to appreciate the economy, color, and clarity that figurative language can afford.
Imagery of all kinds – literal or figurative, and pertaining to any sense – is central to poetry. It lends
familiarity, interest, and vividness to what we read, engages our emotions, promotes economy and
even organization, and implies judgements about experience. Poets employ imagery and figurative
language for all these purposes. Imagery means any language which appeals or refers to any of our
senses. The following terms are sometimes used to label the senses : visual, auditory, gustatory,
olfactory, tactile (including kinetic imagery for motion and thermal imagery for heat).

Many different kinds of figures of speech have been identified and named by readers and literary
scholars. Among the simplest is the simile, a direct comparison using ‘like’ or ‘as’ to connect two
different objects or ideas. The following stanza by Robert Burns contains two famous similes.

O my Luve’s like a red, red rose,

That’s newly sprung in June
O my Luve’s like the melodie
That’s sweetly play’d in tune

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Figurative language almost always involves some sort of sensory imagery, but it goes beyond literal
imagery to draw comparisons or connections between things, and to augment, extend, or contradict
customary usage so that the unfamiliar is made more familiar. Figures of speech are sometimes
called tropes (from Greek “turns”) to show how they turn or transfer meaning from one object to
another. The figure of speech is both restrictive and extensive at the same time. It restricts the
meanings or associations we transfer to the ‘man’ (in the example : “This man is a fox”), but it
extends our ideas about him far beyond the word man. In the following poem, “Metaphors”,
Sylvia Plath uses a series of metaphors to describe her pregnancy.

I’m a riddle in nine syllables,

An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers !
This loaf’s big with its yeasty rising.
Money’s new-minted in this fat purse.
I’m a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I’ve eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there’s no getting off.

Instead of using ‘like’ or ‘as’ to show comparison, the metaphor uses an explicit or implicit
comparison of two things, one of which clarifies the other. Consider these statements :
• Simile : He is like a bull
• Explicit Metaphor : He is a bull.
• Implicit Metaphor : I wouldn’t want him in my China closet.
As we move down the list, we have to be more careful, to see how the term clarified, called the
tenor (“he” in this case) is in fact clarified by the term to which it is compared, the vehicle (the
bull). The grounds of the comparison (clumsiness) is the point where tenor and vehicle coincide.

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Three important sub-classes of metaphor are used with sufficient frequency that they have been
given individual names. In personification human characteristics are attributed to non-human or
inanimate things.

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay :
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

In “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”, Wordsworth makes the daffodils seem human by comparing
them to a crowd or a host and by showing them “tossing their heads in sprightly dance”.

Metonymy and synecdoche, though similar in meaning, can be distinguished in the following way.
In metonymy, a quality or attribute or object usually associated with stg is used to stand for that
thing, as the “Oval office” stand for the President of the US. In synecdoche, a part of stg is used to
stand for the whole, as when we use “farm hands” to mean the people who help with farm work.

Theorists of poetry and language (not to mention poets themselves) do not agree on what metaphors
actually do to us or exactly how they work. However, whichever the effects, confrontation –or
double vision- of two words and the objects or ideas they refer to; filtering or extension of meaning,
one chooses to emphasize, the fact remains that metaphors and figures of speech in general provide
much of the precision, economy, and intense emotion we associate with poetry.

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Apostrophe involves addressing an abstraction or object as though it were a person, “Full
nakedness, all joys are due to thee”, or an absent or dead person as though he or she were living or
present. A paradox is a statement that contradicts itself, but which is still in some sense true, as
when Donne says in his poem “To His Mistress, Going to Bed”, “To enter in these bonds is to be
free.” Only by entering into the bonds of love can he attain the freedom of affection and sexuality
e obviously desires. Donne uses hyperbole when he calls his mistress his America, his empery (or
empire, line 29), or when he says she brings “a heaven like Mahomet’s paradise” (line 21). These
statements are exaggerations that go beyond what is literally accurate, but that contain figurative
truth.

In understatement, the counterpart of overstatement, the writer says less than what he or she
intends. When at the end of his poem “Birches” the poet Robert Frost says “One could do worse
than be a swinger of birches,” he means that one could hardly do better.

Two somewhat specialized figures of speech remain to be mentioned. The conceit is a metaphor
which brings together two radically dissimilar things, for which no ground of comparison is
obvious or even apparently possible. When T.S. Eliot, in his poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock” says, “… the evening is spread out against the sky/Like a patient etherize upon a table,”
he is using a conceit. The figure of speech implies a deadened atmosphere, with perhaps a ridge of
clouds in the skies.

Symbols present more difficulties for most readers. They are easy to miss, and, if found, difficult
to pin down. Since they are one of the most prevalent and dynamic figures of speech in
contemporary poetry, however, they warrant our special attention. Like symbols in fiction, poetic
symbols can be objects, people, or events that stand for something else –some larger idea that the
poet is trying to convey to us. They differ from simple metaphor in that they are actually present
in the words that contain them. They are not merely referred to for purposes of comparison.

Critics customarily distinguish among four kinds of symbols.

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• Natural symbols comprise those objects occurring in nature that are invested with the same
meaning by virtually all cultures worldwide. The sun is commonly a symbol of light, vitality,
knowledge, and power. Roses are symbols of beauty.
• In conventional symbols, a object made by humans is invested with a significance agreed upon
by all members of a cultural group. The cross, the lamb, the Star of David…
• Nonce symbols are those used “for the nonce”, or for the time being, by a given poet. They are
the most common kind of symbol. Like the “Titanic” in the poem by Thomas hardy, “The
Convergence of the Twain”, they can mean different things at different times- to the same
poet or to different poets.
• Private symbols are those used recurrently by a poet with consistent significance in a variety
of works. The gyre, or cone-shaped spiral, is a private symbol used by the Irish poet William
Butler Yeats to suggest the cyclical patterns of history.

III. PERSONA, DRAMATIC SITUATION, AND TONE

In a way, reading a poem is like listening to a voice and making conjectures about the person behind
that voice. Basically, we use the same clues as when we try to picture a telephone caller we’ve
never seen but with whom we’ve had several phone conversations; the difference is that poems are
written with great care so that the voice is more accurately presented. Poets represent the voice of
the poem through the details selected, the words chosen, the arrangement of those words and
details, the tone of voice or attitude of that voice, and the context of what is said.

We call the voice of the poem the persona from the Latin, meaning mask. Just as actors wore
masks in Greek tragedies to represent the characters they were playing, the poet wears a mask or
assumes a role like an actor when writing a poem. Sometimes the poet will assume a completely
fictitious role. At other times, the poet will present some aspect of himself, even in what seems to
be an undisguised autobiographical utterance. Even when the details of the poem seem to match
autobiographical details of the poet’s own life and the utterance seems a “confessional” poem, it
is usually best to assume that the mask is donned for the moment, that the poet is objectifying the
situation by isolating one aspect of his or her personality.

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If poems have speakers, it follows that they also have listeners, auditors to whom the words are
spoken. Sometimes the auditor may be simply the reader who, if not addressed directly, eavesdrops
on the utterance of the persona. The poet may also carry on a silent mental dialogue with himself
or herself, or with aspects of himself or herself, as we all do. In this case, we say that the poet
addresses his alter ego. Sometimes, the auditor is another person, the poet’s lover, his wife, her
husband… . When the a poem presents the voice of one speaker who addresses a silent listener we
call it a soliloquy or monologue. But a special sort of monologue, the dramatic monologue,
presents the voice of a speaker who unintentionally and often ironically reveals himself or herself
to the silent auditor. When the auditor is an imaginary or absent person, or the person is treated as
if he were absent, the poet is using a form of apostrophe.

It is not only necessary to identify the persona, and the listener, but another important step in
reading a poem literally is to identify the dramatic situation. Like stage plays, many poems present
dramatic situations and have some of the elements of a play : characters, setting, and conflict. Many
poems will present us with more than a voice. If different speakers are not named or otherwise
identified, we need to be able to hear the different voices of the speakers. As in monologue, this is
done by attending to the choice of words, the attitude, the tone, and the details mentioned.
Sometimes the poet uses other clues to indicate that the speaking voice has changed. At times the
language and attitude will be supported by the rhetorical arrangements of the words in the stanza.
Different voices may occupy the same position in each stanza, or the poet may provide a further
clue by changing the typeface or the punctuation to indicate either a different speaker or two
attitudes of the same speaker.
However, the drama may not always be presented directly. We may need to put together what we
know about the speaker and the auditor with what we know about the setting in order to grasp the
implications of the drama or to actually understand the conflict. In Gerard Manley Hopkins’
“Spring and Fall : To a Young Child”, the title and the first word of the poem tell us that
Margaret, a young girl, is being addressed by an older person. Here the setting –the fall of the year
– and Margaret’s reactions to it are important. The full implications of the connection between
character in setting are revealed as the speaker predicts Margaret’s subsequent reactions to the
death of the year and to her growing understanding of why she weeps.

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 Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving ?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you ?
Ah ! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name :
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed :
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

The drama of Hopkins’ poem presents a universal conflict - between heart and head, youth and age
- in a very subtle way.

One of the most intricate tasks for the reader is to discern the tone or attitude of the voices in the
poem. Like in ordinary speech, tone in poetry means the attitude of the speaker toward the subject
and the audience. However, the matter of tone is somewhat more complicated in poetry than it is
in everyday speech.
First, we are reading the printed poem, so we must imagine the oral tone of voice of the speaker.
The poet, however, gives us clues to assist our imagination in recreating the tone of voice the
speaker was intended to have. The range of possible tones is enormous, but it could include matter-
of-factness, irony, amusement, anger, smoldering hatred, deep-seated bitterness, uninhibited joy,
tranquility, playfulness, shock, pained or delighted surprise, and so on. The intended tone is
indicated by the choice of words, their arrangement and by the details selected. Look at this poem,
“My Papa’s Waltz”, by Theodore Roehtke :

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 The Whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death;
Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans

Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother’s countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist

Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head

With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.

A second problem in hearing the tone of a poem arises from the presence of more than one tone.
This may be due to mixed tones or attitudes of the persona – that is the voice of the poem may
express either ambiguous or confused attitude, or the poem may be a “growth poem” in which the
speaker grows out of one mood into another.
Multiple tones may also result when the persona and the character in the poem hold different
attitudes. The voice of the poet, or some aspect of the poet’s persona may interpret events in the
miniature drama of the poem differently from one of the poet’s characters.

Lying midway between simple paraphrase of the literal meaning of the poem and detailed
interpretation of the poem’s figures of speech, analysis of a poem’s dramatic situation, persona,
and tone requires attention to detail and sensitivity to nuances. Just as careful listening during a

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conversation is essential for full participation; careful listening with what the poet Robert Frost
called “the ear of the imagination” can open the door to the experience the poet intended you to
have in reading a poem.

IV. METER, RHYTHM, AND FREE VERSE

Because of nursery rhymes, greeting cards, television jingles, song lyrics, and popular or classical
poetry from an earlier day, most of us grow up thinking that one of the distinguishing qualities of
poetry is meter or « beat » - theoretically, regular, recurring pattern of stressed and unstressed
syllables. Read aloud this stanza from A.E. Housman’s “To an Athlete Dying Young”. Its “beat”
is particularly noticeable.

The time you won your town the race

We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder high.

Notice that each line contains eight syllables, and that there is a pronounced alternation between
relatively unstressed syllables (the odd-numbered ones) and relatively stressed syllables (the even-
numbered ones). This regular alternation is meter. In Housman’s poem, the presence of meter is
reinforce by the obvious rhyme (race/place, by/high) and by the use of four line stanzas or groups
of lines.
Now read these lines from John Milton’s “Description of Satan” from Paradise Lost.

High on a throne of royal state, which far

Outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind,
Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand
Show’rs on her kings barbaric pearl and gold,
Satan exalted sat, . . .

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This verse also has meter : each line contains ten syllables, and generally, there is an alternation
between unstressed and stressed syllables. But these lines do not rhyme, and because the “beat” is
not so regular, the meter of the passage seems less pronounced. Such unrhymed lines with ten
syllables alternating between unstressed and stressed are called blank verse.
One last example, “Constantly risking absurdity” by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, will allow us to put
meter in its proper perspective.

Constantly risking absurdity

And death
Whenever he performs
Above the heads
Of his audience
The poet like an acrobat
Climbs on rime
To a high wire of his making
And balancing on eyebeams
Above a sea of faces
Paces his way
To the other side of day
This poem has no meter, no regular line length, and no rhyme. Except for the line as a structural
unit, we cannot immediately sense any pattern around which Ferlinghetti has organized his poem.

Each of these examples, including Ferlinghetti’s poem, has rhythm, which we could define as the
overall motion of a line (or lines) of poetry. Rhythm includes meter, but goes beyond it to
encompass other aspects of motion such as tempo, pauses, punctuation, line length, and the
arrangement of lines on the page. As readers of poetry, we must be able to detect meter and assess
its importance, but we must also –particularly if we want to understand much modern poetry- be
sensitive to the general rhythms of poems.

When we study meter and rhythm, as well as sound effects and versification, we are studying
prosody. The study of prosody usually begins with the study of meter, which is perhaps the single

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most obvious feature of conventional English verse. Historically, meter has been determined in one
of four ways: Quantitative meter (in which classical Greek and Latin poems were generally
written) is based on the length of syllables, which are considered short or long depending upon
their duration in time. This kind of meter is rarely employed in poetry written in English. In
accentual meter, the number of stressed or accented syllables determines the line, which can
contain any number of unstressed syllables. Such meter was used almost universally in Anglo-
Saxon poetry (700-1100 A.D.), where it was accompanied by heavy alliteration on the stressed
syllables. Richard Wilbur’s “Junk” uses this kind of meter in describing modern subject matter:

An axe angles
From my neighbor’s ashcan;
It is hell’s handiwork,
The wood not hickory,
The flow of the grain
Not faithfully followed.

A third kind of meter, syllabic meter, uses the number of syllables to control the length of the line.
This kind of meter, common in French poetry, is not used frequently in English-language verse.
Note as you read the first stanza of the following poem by Thomas Campion, that the number of
stressed and unstressed syllables varies from line to line. If you read the whole poem, you’ll see
that the lines in each stanza have 5, 8, 8, and 4 syllables respectively.

Rose-Cheeked laura

Rose-cheeked Laura, come,

Sing thou smoothly with thy beauty’s
Silent music, either other
Sweetly gracing.

Since the time of Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340-1400), author of the Canterbury Tales, metered
poetry in English has generally been written in accentual-syllabic meter. That is, it has combined

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the accentual and syllabic systems and has used both numbers of stresses and numbers of syllables
to determine the metrical lengths of lines. The Housman stanza with we’ve started typifies this kind
of meter. Each line contains eight syllables, four stressed and four unstressed.
If we isolate one line from this poem and mark its stressed and unstressed syllables, we perceive
the following pattern.
__ / __ / __ / __ /
The time you won your town the race

We call this marking of stressed and unstressed syllables scansion (the verb is to scan). Any line
of poetry, metered or unmetered, can be scanned; only metered verse will reveal, as this line does,
a regular pattern. Scansion can be a subtle procedure subject to some interpretation because of
context, emphasis, and meaning. When you scan a poem, try not to force the syllables into a pattern.
Say them as naturally as possible, mark what you hear, and try to perceive the general pattern.
There will usually be exceptions to the “ideal”, regular patterns discussed here.
Note that there are four recurring units in the first line of the Housman poem :
__ / __ / ___ / __ /
The time / you won / your town / the race
These units, the smallest recurring metrical units in the line, are called feet.

FOOT ADJECTIVE FORM SCANSION EXAMPLE

Iamb iambic ./ Elaine

Trochee trochaic /. Joseph
Anapest anapestic ../ in the house
Dactyl dactylic /.. edible
Spondee spondaic // Babe Ruth
Pyrrhic pyrrhic .. (context required)

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English poetry, for obvious reasons, is never really written in spondaic or pyrrhic meter. These
kinds of feet are usually used as substitutions for others. In Emily Dickinson’s poem “I Like to see
it lap the Miles”, Dickinson uses both a spondee and a pyrrhic foot in the following line :
_ __ / / __ /
As its / own sta / ble door

Meters whose feet end in a stressed syllable (iambic and anapestic) are generally called rising
meters; meters ending in an unstressed syllable (trochaic and dactylic) are generally called falling
meters. Samuel Taylor Coleridge uses a variety of poetic feet in his clever poem “Metrical Feet”.
If you can scan these lines, you will see that each line is written in the kind of meter named in it.

Trochee trips from long to short;

From long to long in solemn sort
Slow Spondee stalks; strong foot ! yet ill able
Ever to come up with Dactyl trisyllable.
Iambics march from short to long –
With a leap and a bound the swift Anapests throng;

The full name of a meter in English combines the designation for the kind of foot with a word
signalling the number of feet per line : monometer (1), dimeter (2), trimeter (3), tetrameter (4),
pentameter (5), hexameter (6), and so forth. Here are some line of poetry exemplifying frequently
used English meters.

FREQUENTLY USED ENGLISH METERS

Iambic pentameter And knaves and fools we both abhorred alike.

John Dryden, “To the Memory of Mr Oldham”, line 6

Iambic tetrameter Had we but world enough and time

Andrew Marvell, “To his Coy Mistress”, line 1

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Trochaic dimeter Edward, Edward
Anonymous, “Edward”, line 2

Anapestic tetrameter With a leap and a bound, the swift anapest throng
Samuel T. Coleridge, “Metrical Feet”, line 5

Dactylic tetrameter Or is it only the breeze in its listlessness

Thomas hardy, “The Voice”, line 9

Iambic trimeter A spotted shaft is seen

Emily Dickinson, “A narrow Fellow in the Grass”, line 1

Iambic hexameter And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

Thomas Hardy, “The Convergence of the Twain”, line 33

Although English speech may tend to fall into a generally iambic pattern (iambic meter is by far
the most common in English verse), regular meter still may strike us as artificial. One important
function of meter in fact derives from their very artificiality. Meter in poetry reinforces our sense
that we are reading something made, and made carefully. Only language that has been “worked
over” will fall into regular meter. Hence meter, like rhyme, serves to remove poetry from the
everyday use of language and place it in a special sphere. Meter secures our attention and engages
our interest. The sense of formalism meter provides also makes poetry more memorizable, and
more memorable.
Meter has other functions. It provides greater vividness to most writing, and can sometimes be used
for mimetic effects; that is, it can be used to imitate the very subject it describes.
Meter, since it is a pattern used consistently, also gives unity to a poem. Moreover, because it
provides a general unity of effect, poets are better able to create extraordinary emphasis by
suddenly varying the meter.

There are other ways besides variation in meter to alter a rhythmical pattern : letter sounds,
enjambment and caesura. These devices will affect rhythm whether or not the passage in which

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they appear is metered. Look at line eight of D.H. Lawrence’s poem “Snake”. It is an excellent
example of how a poet can use the sound of letters to slow down the verse :

A snake came t my water-trough

On a hot, hot day, and I in pajamas for the heat,
To drink there.

In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree

I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before me.

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom

And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge of the stone trough

The vowel sounds in slackness and trough take a relatively long time to say. The s sounds in
slackness, soft, and stone also slow the line down. Moreover the repeated consonants at the end of
one word and the beginning of the nest, as in “slackness soft-bellied down” slow the line still
further. Conversely, of course, poets can speed lines up by using sounds that are simple to
articulate.
In lines seven and eight, Lawrence uses enjambment, the running on of one line of poetry to the
next without punctuation or pause, to approximate the sinuous movement of the snake as it curls
down to the trough. This “wrap-around” effect forces us to pay careful attention to the sentence
Lawrence uses. In lines 31 to 33 of the poem, Lawrence uses a caesura or distinct pause, usually
but not always accompanied by punctuation, to slow down the lines.

Was it cowardice, // that I dared not kill him ?

Was it perversity, // that I longed to talk to him ?
Was it humility, // to feel so honored ?

Double slashes are customarily used to mark caesuras. Note that these heavy pauses help to
emphasize the key nouns of the passage : cowardice, perversity, and humility.

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Lawrence’s “Snake” is written in free verse – verse without rhyme and without and consistent
metrical patterns. When scanned, the verse is seen to be generally iambic, but because Lawrence
is not “required” to stick to an exclusively iambic patter, he is able to achieve, not a greater, but a
different variety of rhythmical effects.

The tradition of free verse poetry in English begins, for all practical purposes, with the American
poet Walt Whitman. He perceived the need for a more oracular, more spacious and less constrained
form for the open-ended, spontaneous, colloquial, and “democratic” poems he included in his major
work, Leaves of Grass ( 1st edition, 1855). Whitman felt that America was too vast, too mercurial,
too restless to be captured in tidy couplets, regular meters, and short, traditional forms.
One significant feature of free verse is that because it lacks strict regularity, it permits and even
invites a freer and more creative use of the space of the page. Free verse does not generally march
symmetrically down the page; it can meander, turn suddenly, become narrow, become wide, and
so forth. Some poets take advantage of this quality to reinforce the meaning of their work. For
example, the long lines Whitman prefers, in the poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”, suggest the
flowing of the river.

The principal distinguishing quality of free verse and the one that gives it its name is its lack of a
regular meter and the absence of rhyme. If you scan a few lines of this poem, you will notice that
its predominant meter is iambic. This is true of the English language in general. But free verse
permits the use of changing meters and sudden shifts from one to another. Thus a poet can, in one
poem, use a more or less regular iambic meter to suggest orderliness, then shift to anapestic meter
to suggest rapid motion. Free verse permits more rhythmical variety.
Free verse also presumes that, besides meter and rhyme, there are other significant ways of
imparting order and organization to a poem. Line length is one of these, as in any poem. Free verse
poems, by their nature, permit more flexibility in both the length of lines and the ways in which
groups of lines can be arranged. Long lines can be used to pile up information or detail; short ones
can be used to give emphasis to images or ideas, repetition of key words at the beginning or end of
lines can also give order….

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Free verse also makes possible the subtle modulation of tempo. Without adhering to any metrical
pattern, poets can adjust words and syllables to suggest almost any speed, many natural sounds,
and many kinds of recurring patterns. Polysyllabic words –like impalpable, sustenance,
disintegrated - can also be used more freely. Perhaps more than any other verse form, free verse
allows a poet to approximate something like natural, colloquial, spontaneous speech.

Two other historical reasons can be cited which help to clarify why so many modern poets,
beginning with British and American poets of the 1920s, have turned to free verse. One is the desire
to rebel against the restraints of past poetic forms, to forge a new path. The other reason is that
many poets, having witnessed the ravages of WWI and the Depression years, felt that they lived,
in fact, in a world that was chaotic, formless, even (at times) senseless and absurd. Free verse
helped to reflect this sense of chaos, of rootlessness, of disjunction from the past.

V. RHYME AND OTHER SOUND DEVICES

Like meter, rhyme is one of the most conventionally distinctive features of poetry. More than that,
it is a time-honored device that is closely associated, for most readers, with the very idea of poetry.
There is nothing wrong, of course, in taking pleasure in rhyme. That is part of its purpose : the
pure, simple pleasure of repeated sounds, as in music. Poetry is after all an oral art, meant to be
heard as well as seen and read, and rhyme is an important aural feature of many poems. But rhyme
is only one of several important sound devices that poets use to get our attention, to help organize
their verse and make it memorable, and to enchant or disturb us with their verbal music. As students
of poetry, and particularly of modern poetry, we must be sensitive to all aspects of sound in the
poems we read. And there are other, sometimes more subtle, aspects of sound in poetry.

The sounds that individual letters and words make have an immediate and obvious importance for
poets trying to give significance to everything in their work. Sounds can be used to bind words and
ideas to one another, to imitate or suggest sounds heard in natural contexts, or to give an overall
timbre to a poem. They can be explosive (b, d, p, t); sibilant (soft c, s); resonant (m, n, and all
vowels); guttural (q, k, and hard g); breathy (h); or liquid (l, r) depending on the effects the poet
wants to produce. For example, in the first line of “Hurt Hawks” (“The broken pillar of the wing

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jags from the clotted shoulder”), the harsh sounds provided by the letters b, p, g, and hard c prepare
us for the harsh subject matter of the poem : a man force to destroy a wounded hawk.

Letter sounds are of course present whenever a poet writes, and sometimes particular sounds will
occur as if by chance. Poet’s choices are governed by numerous considerations, many of which are
more important than the sound of individual letters. We should be cautious about over-interpreting
the merely accidental effects.

Three other sound devices are specific and common enough to have been labeled by literary
scholars : alliteration, assonance, and onomatopoeia. Alliteration or the agreement of nearby
consonant sounds, has a long history in English poetry. Anglo-Saxon poets (70061100), along with
many poets of the Middle English period (1100-1500), used it as a structural principle of each line,
which generally contained three identical consonant sounds, as in this line translated from Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight, a 14th century narrative poem : “After the siege and assault had
ceased at Troy”. Although alliteration is not a central and distinguishing feature of English poetry
since 1500, it does occur frequently in small doses.
Assonance is the name given to the corresponding use o similar vowel sounds in nearby words.
“The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain” is a familiar example. Sometimes sound devices such
as alliteration and assonance are used throughout a poem. Alliteration and assonance of course
produce significant aural effects (or even tactile effects) when we read poems aloud, thus
contributing to the music that we hear. But they have more subtle uses too. They link key words to
one another. They create emphasis. They provide pattern. They have an intangible effect on the
memorability of poems. An they may even suggest theme or mood, as in the painful oo sounds of
Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy”.
Onomatopoeia is usually a more obvious and more self-consciously employed sound device.
Derived from a Greek word meaning ‘to coin names’, it is applied to words that sound like what
they mean. Buzz, crackle, sizzle, and boom are familiar examples. Poets use onomatopoetic words
–sparingly in most cases- to imitate natural sounds directly, much as a composer might use a flute
to imitate a bird call. In “The Bells”, Edgar Allan Poe uses onomatopoeia (as well as other devices
of sound and meter ) to imitate the sound of bells.

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Despite the prevalence and importance of the sound devices already mentioned, most readers still
draw a close association between poetry and the presence of rhyme. On the basis of the degree of
similarity of the rhyming sounds employed, rhymes can be divided into three types :

• Rich rhyme : exhibits identical sounds in all parts of the rhyming words. Air / heir and there
/ their are examples. This kind of rhyme is used only incidentally, never consistently.
• Conventional rhyme : the stressed vowel sounds, and all subsequent sounds of the rhyming
words are identical, but the initial sounds differ. Smoke / stroke, here / clear, eye / sky, and
suspend / contend are examples. Such rhymes as the above are called strong rhymes because
they end on a stressed syllable.
• Conventional rhyme (weak) : ends on an unstressed syllable like in these lines “Death, be not
proud, though some have called thee/Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so”, John Donne
“Death be not Proud . . .”. Readily / steadily is an example of weak rhyme (which tends to be
used less frequently than strong rhyme)
• In Slant rhyme (sometimes called ‘half’, ‘off’ or ‘oblique’ rhyme ) there’s an almost
approximate coincidence of sounds in the rhythming words; but not an exact one.

Rhyme serves an ornamental purpose. It removes the language of poetry from the language we use
every day. It also has an important mnemonic value (it is easier to memorize). Rhyme also creates
marked emphasis, particularly when it occurs, as it usually does at the end of lines. Rhyme also
enhances the musical quality of poetry.
The patterns that rhyming words assume have an important effect on the structure of many poems.
If you look again at Donne’s “Death Be not Proud”, and if you mark each different rhyming sound
with a different letter – this is called the rhyme scheme – you will find the following pattern :
A
B
B
A
A
B
B

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 A
C
D
D
C
E
E
These designations make the stanza of the poem clearer. Stanzas are groups of related lines which
are printed separately on the page and/or are held together by a consistent pattern or rhymes.
Donne’s rhyme scheme suggests either a two-part structure (lines 1-4, 5-8, 9-12, 13-14). Such
stanzas or divisions serve to focus our attention on discrete aspects or stages of Donne’s meaning.
In this case, the four smaller rhyming patterns coincide with four verse sentences of the poem.
When you read rhymed verse, then, mark the patterns and see whether the larger divisions thus
created help you to perceive the overall organization of the poem.
Like the other sound devices mentioned previously, rhyme also serves to bind important ideas to
each other.

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