scarfle | poetry

structure

when you're reading a poem, it might be important to notice the structure of the poem (which comes into play later), in which case it's important to have a handle toolbox of terms. first of all, you might hear people talking about feet in poems. but there are no toes there!!! haw haw. feet are basically stress/unstressed words, and there are a few basic ones that you can identify right off the bat if you're good. i'm not good. here is one that lists a lot of them, but i'll just go over the very basic ones. iamb (weakSTRONG), trochee (STRONGweak), anapest (weakweakSTRONG), and dactyl (STRONGweakweak). for practice, you can mark up some poems you have lying around (a slant over the strong, a curve over the weak), but sometimes there's no right answer and it depends heavily on the context. this is called a scansion. (handy hint! sometimes it helps to look at the punctuation and really think about it! if a line has "yes!" in it then the yes is probably going to be strong, right?)

there are two questions to really ask yourself then. how many feet are in a potato, and what does it matter. feet make up meters! if you have ever heard of an iambic tetrameter, then you are rightyroo about that. the meter names are pretty simple, monometer or dimeter or trimeter and so on. what really matters is that it's just saying how many feet are in each line. so an iambic tetrameter means each line has four feet. tada!! now you have identified a poem, more or less, except a lot of that is in lit crit, which won't really be covered because that's a headache and a half.

one last thing! there are poems with official names, such as the petrarchan sonnet and the english (shakespearan) sonnet. people will identify those by saying letters, like a b a b. this is called a rhyme scheme. those letters represent corresponding rhymes at the end of the line. for example, a b a b might be:

i ate a PEAR (a)
it was GOOD (b)
but then a BEAR (a)
was misunderSTOOD (b)

sonnets and other such forms of poetry have set forms, and you can just look them up until you're good at them.

fun fact! for a common measure, which alternates between iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter, used in "i could not stop for death" by emily dickinson, you can sing it to gilligan's island. try it.

vocabulary

after identifying the structure, then you can look at some certain aspects of the poem! for example, narrator. that's where you ask to whom the narrator is speaking, and sometimes the answer to that is really valuable! but before we get to that part, here's some words that help you identify the type of poem. there's apostrophe where the narrator is addressing an often absent person/thing. there's dramatic monologue, that guy's just going. exposition, narration, epic, etc.

after that, you can look inside the line. (not that there's any order, i am just going big to small to organize it.) but sometimes there's internal rhyme, where the line will rhyme before it ends. oooh, interesting. or maybe there's enjambment, where there's an interruption at the end of the line? the opposite of that is an endstop, where the line has the proper feeling of an ending, often with a period. there is also slant rhymes, where it's not a true rhyme. and then there's just a whole bunch of fun stuff you can look into the poem!

there's metaphor and similes, duh and duh. but there's also consonance, where the consonant sounds are repeated, and assonance, where the vowels are repeated. in terms of imagery, there's metonymy where a concept is represented by an object related to said concept, like so. there's synecdoche, a part of something is used to refer to the whole. it's still being argued whether synecdoche fits with metonymy or not! there's symbol, and understatement, and personification, and just a whole allotment of things.

so why does this matter!!!!

because it helps you read the poem, shouty thing!!!! poetry just has such a long and rich history. you can start with poetry back with ye olde english or just follow along with the different literary periods. poetry was used for epics, lyrics, and then there were sonnets, and you can't forget shakespeare. romanticism with the big six!! there's modernist poetry and postmodern poetry (LOOKING AT YOU ELIOT LOOKING AT YOU) and who can forget the beatnik movement. it's cool to figure out the when of the poem because you can tell what was the style back then, and it might be interesting to help you read it from a different perspective. there were some eras of poetry where the words themselves were considered secondary to rhythm.

but ok!!!! you are still saying. why does it matter to memorize all those vocabulary words!!!!! because you use them, numbnuts. you don't use all of them every time, but there we go. here are some good ways to interpret a poem. you look at the structure!!!! you read the poem, and you recognize there are some plot elements there that reflect the way the structure is built. if there is assonance when the children are playing together in the poem, maybe that means the children are united. if there's slant rhymes later on when the children are fighting, maybe that reflects the discord. sometimes there's enjambment!! does that mean there's something troubling going on with the narration? look at the punctuation, too. in my last duchess, there's a lot of enjambment, making it read a lot like prose. what does that mean? does it mean anything? is there a common connotation to a word, like why a poet uses blood red instead of velvet red? if a poem breaks from the usual iambic tetrameter format, what does that mean? there's alliterations and villaneles, and just a world out there of POETRY.

and after you're good at that, you can look specifically at stuff. weak rhymes, off-rhymes, whatever. even poetry with blank verse will contain various attributes. in one book, the author was very critical of illogical blank verse. that's more lit crit and that is still a headache and a half, asking what is poetry? how is it different from prose? what is the purpose of poetry? and all that good stuff.

but it helps to read a poem by understanding content and form are connected, and you might gain really nifty secret info by looking into that. every poem has a lot of secrets!!!! it's like deciphering a treasure chest, and i have learned a lot from poems by reading them in a different way. in the meanwhile, POETRY.

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