What if i come to know lines uesd in poetry?
Answers
Answered by
1
Poetry is meant to inspire readers and listeners, to connect them more deeply to themselves even as it links them more fully to others. But many people feel put off by the terms of poetry, its odd vocabulary, its notorious difficulty. They may like or even love individual poems—they often seek them for ritual occasions, like weddings and funerals—but they nonetheless feel that poetry itself isn’t for them. They’ve been dispirited by their memories of school. I’ve always believed, however, that poetry goes well beyond the classroom and speaks to a wide variety of people in all kinds of circumstances. It delivers us to ourselves and helps us to live our lives. The terms of poetry—some simple, some complicated, some ancient, some new—should bring us closer to what we’re hearing, enlarging our experience of it, enabling us to describe what we’re reading, to feel and think with greater precision.
I’ve spent more than a decade putting together A Poet’s Glossary, a book of familiar and unfamiliar terms, a compendium of discoveries that has befriended me. The devices work the magic in poetry, and a glossary gives names to those devices. It unpacks them. It is meant to be useful, enjoyable, enlightening, something to keep at hand. Its ultimate purpose is to deepen the reader’s initiation into the mysteries.
Here then are 10 key terms that can enlarge your understanding of poetry:
rhythm: The word rhythm comes from the Greek word rhythmos, “measured motion,” which in turn derives from a Greek verb meaning “to flow.” Rhythm is sound in motion. It is related to the pulse, the heartbeat, the way we breathe. It rises and falls. It takes us into ourselves; it takes us out of ourselves. Rhythm is the combination in English of stressed and unstressed syllables that creates a feeling of fixity and flux, of surprise and inevitability. Rhythm creates a pattern of yearning and expectation, of recurrence and change. It is repetition with a difference.
line: A unit of meaning, a measure of attention. The line is a way of framing poetry. All verse is measured by lines. The poetic line immediately announces its difference from everyday speech and prose. An autonomous line makes sense on its own, even if it is a fragment. It is end-stopped and completes a thought. The first line in Keats’s “Endymion” is end-stopped: “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.” By contrast, an enjambed line carries the meaning over from one line to the next, as in the next four lines of Keats’s poem: “Its loveliness increases; it will never / Pass into nothingness, but still will keep / A bower quiet for us, and a sleep / Full of sweet dreams...” Whether end-stopped or enjambed, however, the line in a poem moves horizontally, but the rhythm and sense also drive it vertically, and the meaning continues to accrue.
iambic pentameter: A five-stress, roughly 10 syllable line. This fundamental line, established by Chaucer (1340?-1400) for English poetry, was energized when English attained a condition of relative stability in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. It might be the traditional formal line closest to the form of our speech and thus has been especially favored by dramatists ever since Christopher Marlowe, whose play Tamburlaine (1587) inaugurated the greatest Elizabethan drama, and William Shakespeare, who used it with astonishing virtuosity and freedom. John Milton showed how supple and dignified the pentameter line could be in Paradise Lost (1667): “Of man’s first disobedience, and the fall / Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste / Brought death into the world, and all our woe, / With loss of Eden, till one greater Man / Restore us, and regain the blissful seat, / Sing, Heav’nly Muse...”
stanza:The natural unit of the lyric: a group or sequence of lines arranged in a pattern. A stanzaic pattern is traditionally defined by the meter and rhyme scheme, considered repeatable throughout a work. A stanzaic poem uses white space to create temporal and visual pauses. The word stanza means “room” in Italian — “a station,” “a stopping place” — and each stanza in a poem is like a room in a house, a lyric dwelling place. Each stanza has an identity, a structural place in the whole. As the line is a single unit of meaning, so the stanza comprises a larger rhythmic and thematic sequence. It is a basic division comparable to the paragraph in prose, but more discontinuous, more insistent as a separate melodic and rhetorical unit. In written poems stanzas are separated by white space, and this division on the printed page gives the poem a particular visual reality.
I’ve spent more than a decade putting together A Poet’s Glossary, a book of familiar and unfamiliar terms, a compendium of discoveries that has befriended me. The devices work the magic in poetry, and a glossary gives names to those devices. It unpacks them. It is meant to be useful, enjoyable, enlightening, something to keep at hand. Its ultimate purpose is to deepen the reader’s initiation into the mysteries.
Here then are 10 key terms that can enlarge your understanding of poetry:
rhythm: The word rhythm comes from the Greek word rhythmos, “measured motion,” which in turn derives from a Greek verb meaning “to flow.” Rhythm is sound in motion. It is related to the pulse, the heartbeat, the way we breathe. It rises and falls. It takes us into ourselves; it takes us out of ourselves. Rhythm is the combination in English of stressed and unstressed syllables that creates a feeling of fixity and flux, of surprise and inevitability. Rhythm creates a pattern of yearning and expectation, of recurrence and change. It is repetition with a difference.
line: A unit of meaning, a measure of attention. The line is a way of framing poetry. All verse is measured by lines. The poetic line immediately announces its difference from everyday speech and prose. An autonomous line makes sense on its own, even if it is a fragment. It is end-stopped and completes a thought. The first line in Keats’s “Endymion” is end-stopped: “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.” By contrast, an enjambed line carries the meaning over from one line to the next, as in the next four lines of Keats’s poem: “Its loveliness increases; it will never / Pass into nothingness, but still will keep / A bower quiet for us, and a sleep / Full of sweet dreams...” Whether end-stopped or enjambed, however, the line in a poem moves horizontally, but the rhythm and sense also drive it vertically, and the meaning continues to accrue.
iambic pentameter: A five-stress, roughly 10 syllable line. This fundamental line, established by Chaucer (1340?-1400) for English poetry, was energized when English attained a condition of relative stability in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. It might be the traditional formal line closest to the form of our speech and thus has been especially favored by dramatists ever since Christopher Marlowe, whose play Tamburlaine (1587) inaugurated the greatest Elizabethan drama, and William Shakespeare, who used it with astonishing virtuosity and freedom. John Milton showed how supple and dignified the pentameter line could be in Paradise Lost (1667): “Of man’s first disobedience, and the fall / Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste / Brought death into the world, and all our woe, / With loss of Eden, till one greater Man / Restore us, and regain the blissful seat, / Sing, Heav’nly Muse...”
stanza:The natural unit of the lyric: a group or sequence of lines arranged in a pattern. A stanzaic pattern is traditionally defined by the meter and rhyme scheme, considered repeatable throughout a work. A stanzaic poem uses white space to create temporal and visual pauses. The word stanza means “room” in Italian — “a station,” “a stopping place” — and each stanza in a poem is like a room in a house, a lyric dwelling place. Each stanza has an identity, a structural place in the whole. As the line is a single unit of meaning, so the stanza comprises a larger rhythmic and thematic sequence. It is a basic division comparable to the paragraph in prose, but more discontinuous, more insistent as a separate melodic and rhetorical unit. In written poems stanzas are separated by white space, and this division on the printed page gives the poem a particular visual reality.
Similar questions