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Advanced Placement Literature and Composition
Poetry
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Essential Skills and Readings Handbook
Name ____________________________________
What is poetry?
“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me I know that is poetry.”
~ Emily Dickinson
“Poetry is a composition of words set to music”
~ Ezra Pound
“”A poem is a statement in language about a human experience.”
~ Yvor Winters
“Poetry is a conversation with the world; poetry is a conversation with the words on the page in which
you allow those words to speak back at you; and poetry is a conversation with yourself.”
~ Naomi Shihab Nye
“Poetry is the kind of thing a poet writes.”
~ Robert Frost
Coming up with a satisfactory and complete definition of poetry is a challenge. It is language. It is
communication. “It is a rhythmical composition of words expressing an attitude, designed to surprise and
delight, and to arouse an emotional response.”
~~~
Literature is an offering; it is creative, considered, and personalized. It requires you to bring your own
experiences of life to the reading also. Your role in analyzing poetry must be an active one. If you do not
understand the poem (and in most instances, this will be true of any first reading) then you must learn to
ask questions and to interrogate the poem. All serious literature is demanding – part of the aim is to
stretch the imagination and to make you think.
Remember what Perrine tells us:
“Any correct interpretation must satisfactorily explain the details of the poem without being contradicted by
any detail; the best interpretations will reply on the fewest assumptions not grounded in the poem itself.
A rose is a rose is a rose, and is more than a rose. But a rose is not an ink blot. Nor is a poem.”
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Reading a Poem
Every good poem begins as the poet’s
But ends as the reader’s.
-MILLER WILLIAMS
How do you read a poem? The literal minded might say, “Just let your eye light on it”; but
there is more to poetry than meets the eye. What Shakespeare called “the mind’s eye” also plays a
part. Many a reader who has no trouble understanding and enjoying prose finds poetry difficult.
This is to be expected. At first glance, a poem usually will make some sense and give some
pleasure, but it may not yield everything at once. Sometimes it only hints at meaning still to come if
we will keep after it. Poetry is not to be galloped over like the daily news: a poem differs from most
prose in that it is to be read slowly, carefully, and attentively. Not all poems are difficult, of course,
and some can be understood and enjoyed on first encounter. But good poems yield more if read
twice; and the best poems—after ten, twenty, or a hundred readings—still go on yielding.
Approaching a thing written in lines and surrounded with white space, we need not expect it
to be a poem just because it is verse. (Any composition in lines of more or less regular rhythm,
usually ending in rhyme, is verse.) Here, for instance, is a specimen of verse that few will call
poetry:
Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November;
All the rest have thirty-one
Excepting February alone,
To which we twenty-eight assign
Till leap year makes it twenty-nine.
To a higher degree than that classic memory-tickler, poetry appeals to the mind and arouses
the feelings. Poetry may state facts, but, more important, it makes imaginative statements that we
may value even if its facts are incorrect. Coleridge’s error in placing a star within the horns of the
crescent moon in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” does not stop the passage from being good
poetry, though it is faulty astronomy. According to one poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, poetry is “to
be heard for its own sake and interest even over and above its interest of meaning.” There are other
elements in a poem besides plain prose sense: sounds, images, rhythms, figures of speech. These
may strike us and please us even before we ask, “But what does it all mean?”
This is a truth not readily grasped by anyone who regards a poem as a kind of puzzle written
in secret code with a message slyly concealed. The effect of a poem (one’s whole mental and
emotional response to it) consists of much more than simply a message. By its musical qualities, by
its suggestions, it can work on the reader’s unconscious. T.S. Eliot put it well when he said in The Use
of Poetry and the Use of Criticism that the prose sense of a poem is chiefly useful in keeping the
reader’s mind “diverted and quiet, while the poem does its work upon him.” Eliot went on to liken
the meaning of a poem to the bit of meat a burglar brings along to throw to the family dog. What is
the work of a poem? To touch us, to stir us, to make us glad, and possibly even to tell us something.
How to set about reading a poem? Here are a few suggestions.
To begin with, read the poem once straight through, with no particular expectations; read
open-mindedly. Let yourself experience whatever you find, without worrying just yet about the
large general and important ideas the poem contains (if indeed it contains any). Don’t dwell on a
troublesome word or difficult passage—just push on. Some o the difficulties may seem smaller when
you read the poem for a second time; at least, they will have become parts of a whole for you.
On the second reading, read for the exact sense of all the words; if there are words you don’t
understand, look them up in a dictionary. Dwell on any difficult parts as long as you need to.
If you read the poem silently, sound its words in your mind. (This is a technique that will get
you nowhere in a speed-reading course, but it may help the poem to do its work on you.) Better still,
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read the poem aloud, or hear someone else read it. You may discover meanings you didn’t perceive
in it before. Even if you are no actor, to decide how to speak a poem can be an excellent method of
getting to understand it. Some poems, like bells, seem heavy till heard. Listen while reading the
following lines from Alexander Pope’s Dunciad. Attacking the minor poet James Ralph, who had
sung the praises of a mistress named Cynthia, Pope makes the goddess of Dullness exclaim:
“Silence ye wolves! While Ralph to Cynthia howls,
And makes night hideous—answer him, ye owls!”
When ye owls slide together and become yowls, poor Ralph’s serenade is turned into the nightly
outcry of a cat.
Try to paraphrase the poem as a whole, or perhaps just the more difficult lines. In
paraphrasing, we put into our own words what we understand the poem to say, restating ideas that
seem essential, coming out and stating what the poem may only suggest. This may sound like a
heartless thing to do to a poem, but good poems can stand it. In fact, to compare a poem to its
paraphrase is a good way to see the distance between poetry and prose. In making a paraphrase,
we generally work through a poem or a passage line by line. The statement that results may take as
many words as the original, if not more. A paraphrase, then, is ampler than a summary, a brief
condensation of the gist, main idea, or story. (Summary of a horror film in TV Guide: “Demented
biologist, coveting power over New York, swells sewer rats to hippopotamus-size.”)
Whenever you paraphrase, you stick your neck out. You affirm what the poem gives you to
understand. And making a paraphrase can help you see the central thought of the poem, its theme.
Theme isn’t the same as subject, the main topic, whatever the poem is “about.” In Romeo and Juliet,
the subject might be love, but the theme might be “don’t confuse love with infatuation.” A
paraphrase, of course, never tells all that a poem contains, nor will every reader agree that a
particular paraphrase is accurate. We all make our own interpretations, and sometimes the total
meaning of a poem evades even the poet who wrote it. Asked to explain a passage in one of his
poems, Robert Browning replied that when he had written the poem, only God and he knew what it
meant; but “Now, only God knows.” Still, to analyze a poem as if we could be certain of its meaning
is, in general, more fruitful than to proceed as if no certainty could ever be had.
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
By William Butler Yeats
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.
Kennedy, X.J. and Dana Gioia. AP Edition: Literature, and Introduction. Pearson: New York, 2009.
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Reading and Analyzing Poems ~ Some Guidelines
Reading a Poem
1. Read the poem aloud. Listen to it. Read it slowly. You don’t play your music on fast forward, and
poetry should not be read in fast forward mode either. Sound and rhythm is often crucial parts of
poetry and may not be noticed if you just read in your head.
2. Read straight through the poem the first time and get a feel for it.
3. Reread the poem paying attention to punctuation, sentences, phrases.
4. What is the title? It is not just a label ; titles are entry points into the poem, creating tone, tension
or even interacting with the poem itself.
5. Look up any unfamiliar words.
6. What is the literal elements of the poem do we know? Who is the poet/narrator/persona
portrayed? Who does the audience seem to be – for whom is the poem written? What is the form
and structure of the poem?
7. What is the setting of the poem ? What is the occasion for the poem?
8. What it the literal message of the poem? Subject matter and theme?
9. What images are present? Which senses do they appeal to and which sense dominates?
10. Observe the diction of the poem. What connotations are evoked from the word choice?
11. How does the syntax aid in communicating the message of the poem effectively? Is it strained and
forced or balanced and varied?
12. What poetic devices does the poem use? Similes, metaphors, personification, metonymy, ironies,
parallels, paradoxes, overstatement, understatement, etc.
13. Identify any allusions or symbols.
14. What sound patterns are used? Rhythm, rhyme, assonance, alliteration, etc. What is the meter?
Scan the poem and mark its scansion.
15. Finally, consider which of the individual parts contribute to the total experience of the poem:
_____ title
_____ sound
_____ tone
_____ imagery
_____ diction
_____ syntax
_____ symbols
_____allusions
_____ form
What is the central purpose of the poem?
16. What did you learn from the poem? It could be about
-The poet
- The poem
- Life
- Ourselves
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Major Types of Poems
1. Lyric Poetry
Originally, as its Greek name suggests, a lyric was a poem sung to the music of a lyre. This earlier
meaning—a poem made for singing—is still current today, when we use lyrics to mean the words of a popular
song. But the kind of printed poem we now call a lyric is usually something else, for over the past five hundred
years the nature of lyric poetry has changed greatly. Ever since the invention of the printing press in the
fifteenth century, poets have written less often for singers, more often for readers. In general, this tendency
has made lyric poems contain less word-music and (since they can be pondered on a page) more thought—
and perhaps more complicated feelings.
Here is a rough definition of a lyric as it is written today: a short poem expressing the thoughts and
feelings of a single speaker. Often a poet will write a lyric in the first person (“I will arise and go now, and go
to Innisfree”), but not always. Instead, a lyric might describe an object or recall an experience without the
speaker’s ever bringing himself or herself into it.
Perhaps because, rightly or wrongly, some people still think of lyrics as lyre-strummings, they expect a
lyric to be an outburst of feeling, somewhat resembling a song, at least containing musical elements such as
rime, rhythm, or sound effects. Such expectations are fulfilled in “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” that impassioned
lyric full of language rich in sound. Many contemporary poets, however, write short poems in which they voice
opinions or complicated feelings—poems that no reader would dream of trying to sing. Most people would
call such poems lyrics too; one commentator has argued that a lyric may contain an argument.
Piano
By D.H. Lawrence (1918)
Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.
In spite of myself, the insidious mastery 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 cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.
So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour
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.
Aunt Jennifer's Tigers
By Adrienne Rich (1951)
Aunt Jennifer's tigers prance across a screen,
Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.
They do not fear the men beneath the tree;
They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.
Aunt Jennifer's finger fluttering through her wool
Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.
The massive weight of Uncle's wedding band
Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer's hand.
When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie
Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.
The tigers in the panel that she made
Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.
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2. Sonnets
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14 lines poem usually written in iambic pentameter
Focus on one subject
Two types = Shakespearean/English or Petrarchan/Italian
Petrarchan sonnet has two parts –
o 8 line octave with rhyme scheme abba abba
o 6 line sestet with a rhyme scheme cdecde or some variation
o The volta, or turn, occurs between the octave and the sestet
o Octave usually presents a problem, idea or question and the sestet
solves or answers it
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Shakespearean rhyme scheme = ababcdcdefefgg
 Three quatrains and one couple
 couplet amplifies, restates or reverses the poem’s theme or ideas
When we speak of “traditional verse forms,” we usually mean fixed forms. If written
in a fixed form, a poem inherits from other poems certain familiar elements of
structure: an unvarying number of lines, say, or a stanza pattern. In addition, it may
display certain conventions: expected features such as themes, subjects, attitudes, or
figures of speech. In the poetry of western Europe and America, the sonnet is the fixed
form that has attracted for the longest time and the longest number of noteworthy
practitioners. Originally an Italian form, the sonnet owes much of its prestige to
Petrarch (1304-1374), who wrote in it of his love for the unattainable Laura. So great
was the vogue for sonnets in England at the end of the sixteenth century that a
gentleman might have been thought a boor if he couldn’t turn out a decent one. Not
content to adopt merely the sonnet’s fourteen-line pattern, English poets also tried on
its conventional mask of the tormented lover. Soon after English poets imported the
sonnet in the middle of the sixteenth century, they worked out their own rhyme
scheme—one easier for them to follow than Petrarch’s, which calls for a greater
number of rhyming words than English can readily provide. Within its form, a poetry
may pursue one idea throughout the three quatrains and then in the couplet end with a
surprise.
SONNET 116, Shakespeare (1609)
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
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3. Narrative Poetry
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the narrative poems tells a story
it can be brief or long (epic)
usually objective
told by a speaker detached from the action
contains regular rhyme scheme
Although a lyric sometimes relates an incident, or like “Piano” draws a scene, it does
not usually relate a series of events. That happens in a narrative poem, one whose
main purpose is to tell a story. In Western literature, narrative poetry dates back to the
Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh (composed before 2000 B.C.) and Homer’s epics the
Iliad and the Odyssey (composed before 700 B.C.). It may well have originated much
earlier. In England and Scotland, storytelling poems have long been popular; in the
late Middle Ages, ballad—or storytelling songs—circulated widely. The art of
narrative poetry invites the skills of a writer of fiction: the ability to draw characters
and settings briefly, to engage attention, to shape a plot. Needless to say, it alls ofr all
the skills of a poet as well.
"Out, Out - ", by Robert Frost (1916)
The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard
And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,
Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.
And from there those that lifted eyes could count
Five mountain ranges one behing the other
Under the sunset far into Vermont.
And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled,
As it ran light, or had to bear a load.
And nothing happened: day was all but done.
Call it a day, I wish they might have said
To please the boy by giving him the half hour
That a boy counts so much when saved from work.
His sister stood beside him in her apron
To tell them "Supper." At the word, the saw,
As if it meant to prove saws know what supper meant,
Leaped out at the boy's hand, or seemed to leap He must have given the hand. However it was,
Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!
Half in appeal, but half as if to keep
The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all Since he was old enough to know, big boy
Doing a man's work, though a child at heart He saw all was spoiled. "Don't let him cut my hand off The doctor, when he comes. Don't let him, sister!"
So. The hand was gone already.
The doctor put him in the dark of ether.
He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.
And then - the watcher at his pulse took a fright.
No one believed. They listened to his heart.
Little - less - nothing! - and that ended it.
No more to build on there. And they, since they
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.
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4. Dramatic Monologues
A third kind of poetry is dramatic poetry, which presents the voice of an imaginary character (or
characters) speaking directly, without any additional narration by the author. A dramatic poem,
according to T.S. Eliot, does not consist of “what the poet would say in his own person, but only what he
can say within the limits of one imaginary character addressing another imaginary character.” Strictly
speaking, the term dramatic poetry describes any verse written for the stage (and until a few centuries ago
must playwrights, like Shakespeare and Moliere, wrote their plays mainly in verse). But the term most
often refers to the dramatic monologue, a poem written as a speech made by a character (other than the
author) at some decisive moment. A dramatic monologue is usually addressed by the speaker to some
other character who remains silent. If the listener replies, the poem becomes a dialogue (such as Thomas
Hardy’s “Ruined Maid”) in which a story unfolds in the conversation between two speakers.
The Victorian poet Robert Browning, who developed the form of the dramatic monologue, liked to put
words in the mouths of characters who were conspicuously nasty, weak, reckless, or crazy. One such
example is his poem “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister,” in which the speaker is an obsessively proud
and jealous monk. The dramatic monologue has been a popular form among American poets, including
Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, Randall Jarrell, and Sylvia Plath. The most
famous dramatic monologue ever written is probably Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” in which the poet
creates a Renaissance Italian Duke whose words reveal more about himself than the aristocratic speaker
intends.
Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister
Robert Browning (1842)
Gr-r-r-there go, my heart's abhorrence!
Water your damned flower-pots, do!
If hate killed men, Brother Lawrence,
God's blood, would not mine kill you!
What? your myrtle-bush wants trimming?
Oh, that rose has prior claims-Needs its leaden vase filled brimming?
Hell dry you up with its flames!
II
At the meal we sit together:
Salve tibi! I must hear
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Wise talk of the kind of weather, 10
Sort of season, time of year:
Not a plenteous cork-crop: scarcely
Dare we hope oak-galls, I doubt:
What's the Latin name for "parsley"?
What's the Greek name for Swine's Snout?
III
Whew! We'll have our platter burnished,
Laid with care on our own shelf!
With a fire-new spoon we're furnished,
And a goblet for ourself,
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Rinsed like something sacrificial
Ere 'tis fit to touch our chaps —
Marked with L. for our initial!
(He-he! There his lily snaps!)
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IV
Saint, forsooth! While brown Dolores
Squats outside the Convent bank
With Sanchicha, telling stories,
Steeping tresses in the tank,
Blue-black, lustrous, thick like horsehairs,
— Can't I see his dead eye glow,
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Bright as 'twere a Barbary corsair's?
(That is, if he'd let it show!)
V
When he finishes refection,
Knife and fork he never lays
Cross-wise, to my recollection,
As I do, in Jesu's praise.
I the Trinity illustrate,
Drinking watered orange-pulp —
In three sips the Arian frustrate
While he drains his at one gulp.
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VI
Oh, those melons? If he's able
We're to have a feast! so nice!
One goes to the Abbot's table,
All of us eager to get a slice.
How go on your flowers? None double?
Not one fruit-sort can you spy?
Strange! And I, too, at such trouble,
Keep them close-nipped on the sly!
VII
There's a great text in Galatians,
Once you trip on it, entails
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Twenty-nine distinct damnations,
One sure, if another fails.
If I trip him just a-dying,
Sure of heaven as sure can be,
Spin him round and send him flying
Off to hell, a Manichee?
VIII
Or, my scrofulous French novel,
On grey paper with blunt type!
Simply glance at it, you grovel
Hand and foot in Belial's gripe:
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If I double down its pages
At the woeful sixteenth print, When he gathers his greengages,
Ope a sieve and slip it in't?
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Or, there's Satan! — one might venture
Pledge one's soul to him, yet leave
Such a flaw in the indenture
As he'd miss it till, past retrieve,
Blasted lay that rose-acacia
We're so proud of! Hy, Zy, Hine . . .
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'St, there's Vespers! Plena gratia
Ave, Virgo! Gr-r-r — you swine!
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5. Ode
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Poetry characterized by a serious topic and a formal tone
No standard pattern
Lengthy lyrical poems
Often include lofty emotions written/conveyed in a dignified style
Typical topics = truth, art, freedom, justice and the meaning of life
Often written for public publication, reading
Use of apostrophe is common (especially with the Romantic poets)
6. Villanelle
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19 lines
Divided into 5 tercets (five groups of three lines) and 1 quattrain
Rhyme scheme aba aba aba aba aba abaa
Line 1 is repeated to form line 6, 12 and 18
Line 3 is repeated to form line 9, 15 and 19
A very structured poem – why would someone use it? Think about irony!
Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” is a famous villanelle
7. Sestina
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39 lines divided into 6 six-line stanzas and a 3 line concluding stanza called an envoy
Words are repeated from the first stanza’s end lines in the other stanzas endlines.
Very demanding fixed form
Elizabeth Bishop’s “Sestina” appeared on a previous AP multiple choice section
Consider the repetition of words – what words are emphasized and why?
Writing an Essay about poetry
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You will write one essay about an unseen poem (or pair of poems) on the exam
The more poetry you READ and THINK ABOUT the better prepared you will be.
All essay questions are fundamentally asking the same two important questions: what is the poem
about and how is the theme conveyed?
The HOW questions is much more important than the WHAT question. This is when you are
expected to demonstrate your understanding of how writers use language for a particular effect.
It is likely that you will be asked to compare and contrast two poems. You will be presented with
two poems with a similar subject or theme. Your job will be to evaluate the ways in which they
are similar and the ways in which they are different. You are expected to find more differences or
that the differences are more significant than the similarities. The A.P. examiners are trying to
show how universal themes may be conveyed in radically different ways.
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Graphic organizers
1. To write an essay in response to a single poem:
Introduction – theme/so what threads through your discussion of each device
Element/Device A
Element/Devise B
Element /Devise C
Conclusion ~ So What ??
2. To plan and write an essay in response to a pair of poems (comparison/contrast):
Devices
Poem A
Poem B
Subject/theme
Form
Diction
Imagery
Rhythm
Sound effects
Mood
Evaluation/personal
response
Once you have done your comparison, decide on the important elements to discuss. MOST
comparison/contrast essays follow one of two formats.
Format A:
Intro
Elements/devices presented in Poem A are discussed
Elements/devices presented in Poem B are discussed
Conclusion
Format B:
Intro
Element A discussed using both poems
Element B discussed using both poems
Element C discussed using both poems
Element D discussed using both poems
Conclusion
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Rhythm
English, unlike some other languages, depends largely for its meaning on the varying emphasis, or stress,
that we put on parts of words (syllables).
Both words and sentences depend upon stress-variation. For example, in the words “swallow bacon
sandwiches” we stress the first syllable of each word” SWAllow Bacon SANDwiches. We would sound
daft if we said “swallow bacon sandwiches.
In the simple sentence “I want to go” the meaning changes according to where we put the stress:
I want to go.
I want to go.
I want to go.
This business of stress is quite complicated because we are capable of voicing quite subtle shades of
emphasis to achieve subtle shades of meaning. The patterns of stress position and variation are what we
mean by “the natural rhythms of ordinary speech,” and by common consent there are limits to the liberties
we can take with them.
Different stressed syllables can be marked like this:
/
indicates a strongly stressed syllable
u
indicates an unstressed syllable or a lightly stressed syllable
We frequently speak in a more or less regular rhythm without being particularly aware of it.
Here’s an ordinary sentence:
I had a go on Kevin’s bike and smashed it up against a bus.
Its natural stresses go like this:
U/ u/ u / u
/
u
/
u / u/
u /
I had a go on Kevin’s bike and smashed it up against a bus
As you can see, it follows a regular sequence of light, heavy, light, heavy stresses. It divides into eight
similar units:
U/
u/ u /
u
/
u
/
u /
u/
u /
I had  a go on Kevin’s bike and smashed it up against a bus
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We can even arrange it into two equal lines of four units each, like this:
U/
u/ u /
u
/
I had  a go on Kevin’s bike 
u
/
u /
u/
u /
and smashed it up against a bus
This may not sound much like the poetry you expect, but it happens to have almost exactly the same
rhyme as two of the most famous lines of poetry in English literature:
U/
u
/
I wan der’d lone
U /
That floats
u /
on high
u /
ly as
u
/
a cloud
u /
o’er vales
u /
and hills
The fact that the tragedy of Kevin’s bike and the opening lines of Wordsworth’s The Daffodils happen to
be rhythmically near-identical illustrates a couple of important points.
First, no matter how complex or “artificial” a poem’s form may seem, its basic structural device – the
ordering and variation of stresses – is taken from ordinary speech. Second, a poem is an artifice, and so
we accept that poets manipulate language in certain ways. But there are limits to the extent that a poet
can interfere with natural speech rhythms. We can allow Wordsworth to shorten (elide) “over” into
“o’er,” but if he were to overturn the stress-order of the lines, we would be unable to read it that way.
This rhythm “de DOM de DOM” sounds silly when it is stressed in an exaggerated way. In a sensible
reading of a poem, rhythm is more subdued. It operates as what W.B. Yeats called “a ghostly voice.” In
poems that do have an underlying rhythm of some sort, the deviations from that rhythm, and the
variations in it, are as at least as important as the rhythm itself. But, obviously, you are not going to spot
these deviations and variations unless you have already “got” the rhythm. Therefore one of the things that
the ear inside your head should be able to do is crank up the rhythm, so to speak, by simplifying and overemphasizing it.
Metrics and Metrical Verse
Meter, or metre, means measure. Metrical verse, therefore, is verse which can be measured. What this
means is that in a metrical poem, the lines consist of a number of rhythmical units which can be counted.
“Kevin’s Bike “ and Wordsworth’s “The Daffodils” are both metrical.
Rhythmical units are called feet. Afoot nearly always has one stressed syllable and one or more unstressed
syllables. Feet differ from one another according to how many syllables they have and where the stress
comes. Each kind of foot has its own peculiar name:
The iamb is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one: u /
14
U /
u /
u /
To be  or not to be
The trochee is the iamb in reverse, a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable:
/u
/
u / u
Stop it  Lois
The anapest has two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable: u u /
U u /
u u
/
Decompose  in the ground
The dactyl is the reverse of the anapest, a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables: / u u
/ uu
/
u u
Parachute  gracefully
A mnemonic device to remember the differences:
Like meters:
Vowels go together = Iamb (u/) and Anapest (uu/)
Consonants for together = Trochees (/u) and Dactyls (/uu)
Opposites meters:
Opposites spell words
IT == iamb (u/) and trochee (/u)
AT == anapests (uu/) and dactyls (/uu)
Iambic and trochaic feet are called double measures because they have two syllables.
Anapestic and dactylic feet are called triple measure because they have three syllables.
In metrical verse, lines have a certain number of feet. Such lines also have names that make sense when
you do the math!
A two foot lines is a dimeter
A three foot line is a trimester
A four foot line is a tetrameter
A five foot lines is a pentameter
A six foot line is a hexameter
A seven foot line is a septameter
Most metrical lines in English have three, four, or five feet. By putting together the kind of foot used and
the number of feet used, you get what is called a metrical description of a line. For example, in the
following two lines the first is an anapestic trimester and the second is an anapestic dimeter.
15
U u
/
u u /
u
u /
I have come  to the borders of sleep.
U u /
u u /
The unfathomable deep.
This is an iambic pentameter
U / u / u /
u /
u
/
If music be the food of love play on
For deeply interesting and mysterious reasons (which we won’t go into here) iambic pentameter is by far
the most common meter in English poetry. Iambic rhythms seem to be more natural to an English speaker.
It seems that is more natural for us to go “de DOM” (iambic) than “DOM de” (trochaic). Trochees seem
to interfere with the language more than iambs do; they seem more pushy and intrusive. Police cars wail
trochaically! For whatever reason, it is likely that if you come across a line of verse which has ten
syllables, that line is an iambic pentameter. And perhaps because iambic pentameters are so common,
poets tend to use them very flexibly – they add a syllable here and there, for instance.
The business of working out metrical patterns in feet is called scansion or scanning.
Variations in Meter
In almost all metrical verse there will be a good deal of variation within the prevailing meter. These
variations are often called metrical substitutions. Some metrical substitutions are more common than
others. The two most frequently employed are:
1. swapping one foot in a line for a different kind of foot
2. cutting a foot short
Example of 1: On Shakespeare’s tomb in Stratford there’s this little iambic verse:
Good friend, for Jesu’s sake forbear
To dig the dust enclosed here.
Blest be the man who spares these stones
And curst be he who moves my bones.
Assuming that Shakespeare wrote this himself, je clearly wanted and arresting, direct opening (I’m
talking to you!), so he substitutes a double-stress foot for the first iamb:
/
/
u / u
/
u /
Good Friend,  for Je su’s sake  forbear
16
This replacing of an iamb with a double-stress foot is so common that this has its own name; it’s called a
spondee. It draws attention to the words where it takes place, which is what metrical variations almost
always do.
Example of 2: Cutting a foot short is called catalexis. This usually happens to feet that end with an
unstressed syllable (trochees and dactyls). Here is a very well-known example:
/ u
/ u
/ u
/
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
It is a sequence of four trochees (a trochaic tetrameter) with the last unstressed syllable missing. Most
trochaic lines have this final syllable snipped off. The main reason for this is rhyme. “Looking” and
“hooking” rhyme, whereas “standing” and “walking” do not, even though all four words end in –ing. If,
therefore, you want to end a line with a strong true rhyme, a stressed syllable is what is called for. In “The
Tyger” this rhyme is important becase it is one of the ways Blake sets up a very strong four-beat rhythm,
almost like a hypnotic chant with which he conjures up the vision of the tiger. The strength of this beat is
reinforced by the repetition of “Tyger” and the repetition of the “b” sound in “burning bright.” If the
missing syllable of the last trochee was put back:
Tyger! Tyger! burning brightly
The line loses an awful lot of punch and goes limp at the end. Not only thatm but it poses a very tricky
problem as far as rhyme is concerne:
Tyger! Tyger! Burning brightly
In the forests, lit up nightly…??!!
Or:
Tyger! Tyger! Burning brightly
In the forests, scorching slightly…??!!
You see how silly it could get.
17
Tone
In old Western movies, when one hombre taunts another, it is customary for the second to drawl, “Smile
when you say that, pardner,” or “Mister, I don’t like your tone of voice.” Sometimes in reading a poem, although
we can neither see a face nor hear a voice, we can infer the poet’s attitude from other evidence.
Like tone of voice, tone in literature often conveys an attitude toward the person addressed. Like the
manner of a person, the manner of a poem may be friendly or belligerent toward its reader, condescending or
respectful. Again like tone of voice, the tone of a poem may tell us how the speaker feels about himself or herself:
humble or cocky, sad or glad. But usually when we ask, “What is the tone of a poem?” we mean, “What attitude
does the poet take toward a theme or a subject?” Is the poet being affectionate, hostile, earnest, playful, sarcastic,
or what? We may never be able to know, of course, the poet’s personal feelings. All we need know is how to feel
when we read the poem.
Strictly speaking, tone isn’t an attitude; it is whatever in the poem makes an attitude clear to us: the choice
of certain words instead of others, the picking out of certain detail. In A.E. Housman’s Loveliest of trees,” for
example, the poet communicates his admiration for a cherry tree’s beauty by singling out for attention its white
blossoms; had he wanted to show his dislike for the tree, he might have concentrated on its broken branches,
birdlime, or snails. To perceive the tone of a poem rightly, we need to read the poem carefully, paying attention to
whatever suggestions we find out.
Loveliest of Trees
A.E.Housman
LOVELIEST of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
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5
10
To a Locomotive in the Winter
By Walt Whitman (1881)
THEE for my recitative!
Thee in the driving storm, even as now—the snow—the winter-day declining;
Thee in thy panoply, thy measured dual throbbing, and thy beat convulsive;
Thy black cylindric body, golden brass, and silvery steel;
Thy ponderous side-bars, parallel and connecting rods, gyrating, shuttling at thy sides;
Thy metrical, now swelling pant and roar—now tapering in the distance;
Thy great protruding head-light, fix’d in front;
Thy long, pale, floating vapor-pennants, tinged with delicate purple;
The dense and murky clouds out-belching from thy smoke-stack;
Thy knitted frame—thy springs and valves—the tremulous twinkle of thy wheels;
Thy train of cars behind, obedient, merrily-following,
Through gale or calm, now swift, now slack, yet steadily careering:
Type of the modern! emblem of motion and power! pulse of the continent!
For once, come serve the Muse, and merge in verse, even as here I see thee,
With storm, and buffeting gusts of wind, and falling snow;
By day, thy warning, ringing bell to sound its notes,
By night, thy silent signal lamps to swing.
Fierce-throated beauty!
Roll through my chant, with all thy lawless music! thy swinging lamps at night;
Thy piercing, madly-whistled laughter! thy echoes, rumbling like an earthquake, rousing all!
Law of thyself complete, thine own track firmly holding;
(No sweetness debonair of tearful harp or glib piano thine,)
Thy trills of shrieks by rocks and hills return’d,
Launch’d o’er the prairies wide—across the lakes,
To the free skies, unpent, and glad, and strong.
The Railway Train
By Emily Dickinson (1862)
I like to see it lap the miles,
And lick the valleys up,
And stop to feed itself at tanks;
And then, prodigious, step
Around a pile of mountains,
And, supercilious, peer
In shanties by the sides of roads;
And then a quarry pare
To fit its sides, and crawl between,
Complaining all the while
In horrid, hooting stanza;
Then chase itself down hill
And neigh like Boanerges;
Then, punctual as a star,
Stop--docile and omnipotent-At its own stable door.
19
5
10
15
20
Questions:
1. What differences in tone do you find between Whitman’s and Dickinson’s poems? Point
out in each poem whatever contributes to these differences.
2. Boanerges in Dickinson’s last stanza means “sons of thunder,” a name given by Jesus to
the disciples John and James (Mark 3:17). How far should the reader work out the
particulars of this comparison? Does it make the tone of the poem serious?
3. In Whitman’s opening line what is recitative? What other specialized terms from the
vocabulary of music and poetry does each poem contain? How do they help underscore
Whitman’s theme?
4. Poets and songwriters probably have regarded the locomotive with more affection than
they have shown most other machines. Why do you suppose this is so? Can you think of
any other poems or songs as examples?
5. What do these two poems tell you about locomotives that you would not be likely to find
in a technical book on railroading?
6. Are the subjects of the two poems identical? Discuss.
“White Lies” by Natasha Trethewey
The lies I could tell,
when I was growing up
light-bright, near-white,
high-yellow, red-boned
In a black place,
Were just white lies.
I could easily tell the white folks
that we lived uptown,
not in the pink and green
shanty-fied shotgun section
along the tracks. I could act
like my homemade dresses
came straight out the window
of Maison Blanche. I could even
keep quiet, quiet as I kept,
like the time a white girl said
(squeezing my hand), Now
we have three of us in this class.
But I paid for it every time
Mama found out.
She laid her hads on me,
then washed out my mouth
with Ivory soap. This
is to purify your lying tongue.
Believing her, I swallowed the suds
Thinking they’d work
from the inside ou
20
Her Kind
By Anne Sexton (1960)
I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.
I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.
I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.
Oh No
By Robert Creeley (1959)
If you wander far enough
you will come to it
and when you get there
they will give you a place to sit
for yourself only, in a nice chair,
and all your friends will be there
with smiles on their faces
and they will likewise all have places.
21
Rites of Passage
By Sharon Olds (1983)
As the guests arrive at our son’s party
they gather in the living room—
short men, men in first grade
with smooth jaws and chins.
Hands in pockets, they stand around
jostling, jockeying for place, small fights
breaking out and calming. One says to another
How old are you? —Six. —I’m seven. —So?
They eye each other, seeing themselves
tiny in the other’s pupils. They clear their
throats a lot, a room of small bankers,
they fold their arms and frown. I could beat you
up, a seven says to a six,
the midnight cake, round and heavy as a
turret behind them on the table. My son,
freckles like specks of nutmeg on his cheeks,
chest narrow as the balsa keel of a
model boat, long hands
cool and thin as the day they guided him
out of me, speaks up as a host
for the sake of the group.
We could easily kill a two-year-old,
he says in his clear voice. The other
men agree, they clear their throats
like Generals, they relax and get down to
playing war, celebrating my son’s life.
The Gold Links
By Sarah N. Cleghorn (1917)
The golf links lie so near the mill
That almost every day
The laboring children can look out
And see the men at pay.
Second Fig
By Edna St. Vincent Millay (1920)
Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand:
Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!
22
The Workbox
By Thomas Hardy
See, here's the workbox, little wife,
That I made of polished oak.'
He was a joiner, of village life;
She came of borough folk.
He holds the present up to her
As with a smile she nears
And answers to the profferer,
''Twill last all my sewing years!'
'I warrant it will. And longer too.
'Tis a scantling that I got
Off poor John Wayward's coffin, who
Died of they knew not what.
'The shingled pattern that seems to cease
Against your box's rim
Continues right on in the piece
That's underground with him.
'And while I worked it made me think
Of timber's varied doom;
One inch where people eat and drink,
The next inch in a tomb.
'But why do you look so white, my dear,
And turn aside your face?
You knew not that good lad, I fear,
Though he came from your native place?'
'How could I know that good young man,
Though he came from my native town,
When he must have left there earlier than
I was a woman grown?'
'Ah, no. I should have understood!
It shocked you that I gave
To you one end of a piece of wood
Whose other is in a grave?'
'Don't, dear, despise my intellect,
Mere accidental things
Of that sort never have effect
On my imaginings.'
Yet still her lips were limp and wan,
Her face still held aside,
As if she had known not only John,
But known of what he died.
23
You fit into me
By Margaret Atwood (1971)
You fit into me
like a hook into an eye
a fish hook
an open eye
The Victory
By Anne Stevenson (1974)
I thought you were my victory
though you cut me like a knife
when I brought you out of my body
into your life.
Tiny antagonist, gory,
blue as a bruise. The stains
of your cloud of glory
bled from my veins.
How can you dare, blind thing,
blank insect eyes?
You barb the air. You sting
with bladed cries.
Snail. Scary knot of desires.
Hungry snarl. Small son.
Why do I have to love you?
How have you won?
Root Cellar
By Theodore Roethke (1948)
Nothing would sleep in that cellar, dank as a ditch,
Bulbs broke out of boxes hunting for chinks in the dark,
Shoots dangled and drooped,
Lolling obscenely from mildewed crates,
Hung down long yellow evil necks, like tropical snakes.
And what a congress of stinks!
Roots ripe as old bait,
Pulpy stems, rank, silo-rich,
Leaf-mold, manure, lime, piled against slippery planks.
Nothing would give up life:
Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.
24
Silence
By Marianne Moore (1924)
My father used to say,
"Superior people never make long visits,
have to be shown Longfellow's grave
nor the glass flowers at Harvard.
Self reliant like the cat -that takes its prey to privacy,
the mouse's limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth -they sometimes enjoy solitude,
and can be robbed of speech
by speech which has delighted them.
The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;
not in silence, but restraint."
Nor was he insincere in saying, "`Make my house your inn'."
Inns are not residences.
Tears, Idle Tears
By Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1847)
Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.
Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,
That brings our friends up from the underworld,
Sad as the last which reddens over one
That sinks with all we love below the verge;
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.
Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.
Dear as remembered kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more.
25
English Con Salsa
By Gina Valdes (1993)
Welcome to ESL 100, English Surely Latinized,
ingles con chile y cilantro, English as American
as Benito Juarez. Welcome, muchachos from
Xochicalco, learn the language of dolares and dolores, of kings
and queens, of Donald Duck and Batman. Holy toluca!
in four months you'll be speaking like George
Washington in four weeks you can ask, More coffee? In two months
you can say, May I take your order? In one year
you can ask for a raise, cool as the Tuxpan River.
Welcome,muchachas from Teocaltiche, in this class
we speak English refrito, English con sal y limon,
English thick as mango juice, English poured from
a clay jug, English tuned like a requinto from Uruapan,
English lighted by Oaxacan dawns, English spiked
with mezcal from Juchitan, English with a red cactus
flower blooming in its heart.
Welcome, welcome, amigos del sur, bring your Zapotec
tongues,our Nathuatl tones, your patience of pyramids,
your red suns and golden moons, your guardian angels,
your duendes, your patron saints, Santa Tristeza,
Santa Alegria, Santo Todolopuede. We will sprinkle
holy water on pronouns, make the sign of the cross
on past participles, jump like fish from Lake Patzcuaro
on gerunds, pour tequila from Jalisco on future perfects,
say shoes and shit, grab a cool verb and a pollo loco
and dance on the walls like chapulines.
When a teacher from La Jolla or a cowboy from Santee
asks you, Do you speak English? You'll answer, Si,
yes, simon, of course. I love English!
And you'll hum
a mixtecchant that touches la tierra and the heavens.
26
Eleanor Rigby
By John Lennon and Paul McCartney (1966)
Ah, look at all the lonely people
Ah, look at all the lonely people
Eleanor Rigby
Picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been
Lives in a dream
Waits at the window
Wearing a face she keeps in a jar by the door
Who is it for?
All the lonely people, where do they all come from?
All the lonely people, where do they all belong?
Father McKenzie
Writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear
No one comes near
Look at him working
Darning his socks in the night when there's nobody there
What does he care?
All the lonely people, where do they all come from?
All the lonely people, where do they all belong?
Ah, look at all the lonely people
Ah, look at all the lonely people
Eleanor Rigby
Died in the church and was buried along with her name
Nobody came
Father McKenzie
Wiping the dirt from his hands as he walks from the grave
No one was saved
All the lonely people, where do they all come from?
All the lonely people, where do they all belong?
27
Snow Day
By Billy Collins
Today we woke up to a revolution of snow,
its white flag waving over everything,
the landscape vanished,
not a single mouse to punctuate the blankness,
and beyond these windows
the government buildings smothered,
schools and libraries buried, the post office lost
under the noiseless drift,
the paths of trains softly blocked,
the world fallen under this falling.
In a while I will put on some boots
and step out like someone walking in water,
and the dog will porpoise through the drifts,
and I will shake a laden branch,
sending a cold shower down on us both.
But for now I am a willing prisoner in this house,
a sympathizer with the anarchic cause of snow.
I will make a pot of tea
and listen to the plastic radio on the counter,
as glad as anyone to hear the news
that the Kiddie Corner School is closed,
the Ding-Dong School, closed,
the All Aboard Children's School, closed,
the Hi-Ho Nursery School, closed,
along with -- some will be delighted to hear -the Toadstool School, the Little School,
Little Sparrows Nursery School,
Little Stars Pre-School, Peas-and-Carrots Day School,
the Tom Thumb Child Center, all closed,
and -- clap your hands -- the Peanuts Play School.
So this is where the children hide all day,
These are the nests where they letter and draw,
where they put on their bright miniature jackets,
all darting and climbing and sliding,
all but the few girls whispering by the fence.
And now I am listening hard
in the grandiose silence of the snow,
trying to hear what those three girls are plotting,
what riot is afoot,
which small queen is about to be brought down.
28
Uphill
By Christina Rosetti (1862)
Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day's journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.
But is there for the night a resting-place?
A roof for when the slow dark hours begin.
May not the darkness hide it from my face?
You cannot miss that inn.
Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?
Those who have gone before.
Then must I knock, or call when just in sight?
They will not keep you standing at that door.
Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?
Of labour you shall find the sum.
Will there be beds for me and all who seek?
Yea, beds for all who come.
Snow White
By Andrea Hollander Budy (1993)
It was actually one of the dwarfs
who kissed her—Bashful,
who still won’t admit it.
That is why she remained in the forest
with all of them and made up
the story of the prince. Otherwise,
wouldn’t you be out there now
scavenging through the wildflowers,
mistaking the footprints of your own
children for those little men?
And if you found some wild apples
growing in the thickest part, if no one
were looking, wouldn’t you
take a bit? And pray
some kind of magic sleep
would snatch you
from the plainness
of your life?
29
Cinderella
By Anne Sexton (1971)
You always read about it:
the plumber with the twelve children
who wins the Irish Sweepstakes.
From toilets to riches.
That story.
Or the nursemaid,
some luscious sweet from Denmark
who captures the oldest son's heart.
from diapers to Dior.
That story.
Or a milkman who serves the wealthy,
eggs, cream, butter, yogurt, milk,
the white truck like an ambulance
who goes into real estate
and makes a pile.
From homogenized to martinis at lunch.
Or the charwoman
who is on the bus when it cracks up
and collects enough from the insurance.
From mops to Bonwit Teller.
That story.
Once
the wife of a rich man was on her deathbed
and she said to her daughter Cinderella:
Be devout. Be good. Then I will smile
down from heaven in the seam of a cloud.
The man took another wife who had
two daughters, pretty enough
but with hearts like blackjacks.
Cinderella was their maid.
She slept on the sooty hearth each night
and walked around looking like Al Jolson.
Her father brought presents home from town,
jewels and gowns for the other women
but the twig of a tree for Cinderella.
She planted that twig on her mother's grave
and it grew to a tree where a white dove sat.
Whenever she wished for anything the dove
would drop it like an egg upon the ground.
The bird is important, my dears, so heed him.
30
Next came the ball, as you all know.
It was a marriage market.
The prince was looking for a wife.
All but Cinderella were preparing
and gussying up for the event.
Cinderella begged to go too.
Her stepmother threw a dish of lentils
into the cinders and said: Pick them
up in an hour and you shall go.
The white dove brought all his friends;
all the warm wings of the fatherland came,
and picked up the lentils in a jiffy.
No, Cinderella, said the stepmother,
you have no clothes and cannot dance.
That's the way with stepmothers.
Cinderella went to the tree at the grave
and cried forth like a gospel singer:
Mama! Mama! My turtledove,
send me to the prince's ball!
The bird dropped down a golden dress
and delicate little slippers.
Rather a large package for a simple bird.
So she went. Which is no surprise.
Her stepmother and sisters didn't
recognize her without her cinder face
and the prince took her hand on the spot
and danced with no other the whole day.
As nightfall came she thought she'd better
get home. The prince walked her home
and she disappeared into the pigeon house
and although the prince took an axe and broke
it open she was gone. Back to her cinders.
These events repeated themselves for three days.
However on the third day the prince
covered the palace steps with cobbler's wax
and Cinderella's gold shoe stuck upon it.
Now he would find whom the shoe fit
and find his strange dancing girl for keeps.
He went to their house and the two sisters
were delighted because they had lovely feet.
The eldest went into a room to try the slipper on
but her big toe got in the way so she simply
sliced it off and put on the slipper.
The prince rode away with her until the white dove
told him to look at the blood pouring forth.
That is the way with amputations.
They just don't heal up like a wish.
The other sister cut off her heel
but the blood told as blood will.
The prince was getting tired.
He began to feel like a shoe salesman.
31
But he gave it one last try.
This time Cinderella fit into the shoe
like a love letter into its envelope.
At the wedding ceremony
the two sisters came to curry favor
and the white dove pecked their eyes out.
Two hollow spots were left
like soup spoons.
Cinderella and the prince
lived, they say, happily ever after,
like two dolls in a museum case
never bothered by diapers or dust,
never arguing over the timing of an egg,
never telling the same story twice,
never getting a middle-aged spread,
their darling smiles pasted on for eternity.
Regular Bobbsey Twins.
That story.
Lady Lazarus
By Sylvia Plath (1962)
I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it-A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot
A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.
Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?-The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.
Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me
And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.
This is Number Three.
32
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.
What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see
Them unwrap me hand and foot-The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladies
These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,
Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.
The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut
As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.
It's easy enough to do it in a cell.
It's easy enough to do it and stay put.
It's the theatrical
Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:
'A miracle!'
That knocks me out.
There is a charge
For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart-It really goes.
And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood
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Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.
I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby
That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.
Ash, ash-You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there-A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.
Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.
Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.
America
By Claude McKay (1922)
Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger's tooth,
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth!
Her vigor flows like tides into my blood,
Giving me strength erect against her hate.
Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood.
Yet as a rebel fronts a king in state,
I stand within her walls with not a shred
Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer.
Darkly I gaze into the days ahead,
And see her might and granite wonders there,
Beneath the touch of Time's unerring hand,
Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.
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Annabel Lee
By Edgar Allan Poe (1849)
It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of ANNABEL LEE;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.
I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea;
But we loved with a love that was more than loveI and my Annabel Lee;
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.
And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsman came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.
The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
Went envying her and meYes!- that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.
But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than weOf many far wiser than weAnd neither the angels in heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.
For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling- my darling- my life and my bride,
In the sepulchre there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea.
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The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
By T.S. Eliot (1917)
S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.
LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question …
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
5
10
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
15
20
25
30
35
36
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
[They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
[They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all:—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?
And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
It is perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
.
.
.
.
.
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?…
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
.
.
.
.
.
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep … tired … or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
37
40
45
50
55
60
65
70
75
80
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.”
And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.”
.
.
.
.
.
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.
I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
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90
95
100
105
110
115
120
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
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I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
38
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
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Note: The epigraph, from Dante’s Inferno, is the speech of one dead and damned, who thinks that his hearer also is going to
remain in Hell. Count Guido da Montefeltro, whose sin has been to give false counsel after a corrupt prelate had offered him
prior absolution and whose punishment is to be wrapped in a constantly burning flame, offers to tell Dante his story:
If I thought my answer were to someone who
might see the world again, then there would be
no more stirrings of this flame. Since it is true
that no one leaves these depths of misery
alive, from all that I have heard reported,
I answer you without fear of infamy.
Not Waving but Drowning
by Stevie Smith
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.
Poor chap, he always loved larking
larking Playing tricks, kidding, fooling around.
larking Playing tricks, kidding, fooling around.
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.
Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.
next to of course god america i
By e.e. cummings
"next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims' and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn's early my
country tis of centuries come and go
and are no more what of it we should worry
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
why talk of beauty what could be more beautiful than these heroic happy dead
who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
they did not stop to think they died instead
then shall the voice of liberty be mute?"
He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water
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The Fish
By Elizabeth Bishop (1946)
I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn't fight.
He hadn't fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled and barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
--the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly-I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
--It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
--if you could call it a lip
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
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or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels--until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.
Southeast Corner
By Gwendolyn Brooks (1945)
The School of Beauty’s tavern now.
The Madam is underground.
Out at Lincoln, among the graves
Her own is early found.
Where the thickest, tallest monument
Cuts grandly into the air
The Madam lies, contentedly.
Her fortune, too, lies there,
Converted into cool hard steel
And right red velvet lining;
While over her tan impassivity
Shot silk is shining.
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anyone lived in a pretty how town
By e.e. cummings
anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn't he danced his did
Women and men(both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn't they reaped their same
sun moon stars rain
children guessed(but only a few
and down they forgot as up they grew
autumn winter spring summer)
that noone loved him more by more
when by now and tree by leaf
she laughed his joy she cried his grief
bird by snow and stir by still
anyone's any was all to her
someones married their everyones
laughed their cryings and did their dance
(sleep wake hope and then)they
said their nevers they slept their dream
stars rain sun moon
(and only the snow can begin to explain
how children are apt to forget to remember
with up so floating many bells down)
one day anyone died i guess
(and noone stooped to kiss his face)
busy folk buried them side by side
little by little and was by was
all by all and deep by deep
and more by more they dream their sleep
noone and anyone earth by april
wish by spirit and if by yes.
Women and men(both dong and ding)
summer autumn winter spring
reaped their sowing and went their came
sun moon stars rain
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What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why
By Edna St. Vincent Millay (1923)
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply;
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in the winter stands a lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet know its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone;
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.
Acquainted with the Night
By Robert Frost (1923)
I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain -- and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,
But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
A luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.
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AP English Poetry Terms
Listed and defined below are literary terms that you will need to know in order to discuss
and write about works of poetry. You are already familiar with many of these.
l. alliteration- the repetition of identical or similar consonant sounds, normally at the
beginnings of words. “Gnus never know pneumonia” is an example of alliteration since,
despite the spellings, all four words begin with the “n” sound.
2. allusion- a reference in a work of literature to something outside the work, especially to a well-known
historical or literary event, person, or work. When T.S. Eliot writes, "To have squeezed the universe into
a ball" in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," he is alluding to the lines "Let us roll our strength and all/
Our sweetness up into one ball" in Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress."
3. antithesis- a figure of speech characterized by strongly contrasting words, clauses, sentences, or
ideas, as in “Man proposes; God disposes.” Antithesis is a balancing of one term against another for
emphasis or stylistic effectiveness. The second line of the following couplet by Alexander Pope is an
example of antithesis:
The hungry judges soon the sentence sign,
And wretches hang that jury-men may dine.
4. apostrophe- a figure of speech in which someone (usually, but not always absent), some abstract
quality, or a nonexistent personage is directly addressed as though present. Following are two examples
of apostrophe:
Papa Above!
Regard a Mouse.
-Emily Dickinson
Milton! Thou shouldst be living in this hour;
England hath need of thee . . ..
-William Wordsworth
5. assonance- the repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds. “A land laid waste with all its young
men slain” repeats the same “a” sound in “laid,” “waste,” and “slain.”
6. ballad meter- a four-line stanza rhymed abcd with four feet in lines one and three and three feet in
lines two and four.
O mother, mother make my bed.
O make it soft and narrow.
Since my love died for me today,
I’ll die for him tomorrow.
7. blank verse- unrhymed iambic pentameter. Blank verse is the meter of most of Shakespeare’s plays,
as well as that of Milton’s Paradise Lost.
8. cacophony- a harsh, unpleasant combination of sounds or tones. It may be an unconscious flaw in
the poet’s music, resulting in harshness of sound or difficulty of articulation, or it may be used
consciously for effect, as Browning and Eliot often use it. See, for example, the following line from
Browning’s “Rabbi Ben Ezra”:
Irks care the crop-full bird? Frets doubt the maw-crammed beast?
44
9. caesura- a pause, usually near the middle of a line of verse, usually indicated by the sense of the line,
and often greater than the normal pause. For example, one would naturally pause after “human’ in the
following line from Alexander Pope:
To err is human, to forgive divine.
10. conceit- an ingenious and fanciful notion or conception, usually expressed through an elaborate
analogy, and pointing to a striking parallel between two seemingly dissimilar things. A conceit may be a
brief metaphor, but it also may form the framework of an entire poem. A famous example of a conceit
occurs in John Donne’s poem “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” in which he compares his soul and
his wife’s to legs of a mathematical compass.
11. consonance- the repetition of similar consonant sounds in a group of words. The term usually refers
to words in which the ending consonants are the same but the vowels that precede them are different.
Consonance is found in the following pairs of words: “add” and “read,” “bill and ball,” and “born” and
“burn.”
12. couplet- a two-line stanza, usually with end-rhymes the same.
13. devices of sound- the techniques of deploying the sound of words, especially in poetry. Among
devices of sound are rhyme, alliteration, assonance, consonance, and onomatopoeia. The devices
are used for many reasons, including to create a general effect of pleasant or of discordant sound, to
imitate another sound, or to reflect a meaning.
14. diction- the use of words in a literary work. Diction may be described as formal (the level of usage
common in serious books and formal discourse), informal (the level of usage found in the relaxed but
polite conversation of cultivated people), colloquial (the everyday usage of a group, possibly including
terms and constructions accepted in that group but not universally acceptable), or slang (a group of
newly coined words which are not acceptable for formal usage as yet).
15. didactic poem- a poem which is intended primarily to teach a lesson. The distinction between
didactic poetry and non-didactic poetry is difficult to make and usually involves a subjective judgement of
the author’s purpose on the part of the critic or the reader. Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism is a
good example of didactic poetry.
16. dramatic poem- a poem which employs a dramatic form or some element or elements of dramatic
techniques as a means of achieving poetic ends. The dramatic monologue is an example.
17. elegy- a sustained and formal poem setting forth the poet’s meditations upon death or another
solemn theme. Examples include Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”; Alfred, Lord
Tennyson’s In Memoriam; and Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”
18. end-stopped- a line with a pause at the end. Lines that end with a period, a comma, a colon, a
semicolon, an exclamation point, or a question mark are end-stopped lines.
True ease in writing comes from Art, not Chance,
As those move easiest who have learn’d to dance.
19. enjambment- the continuation of the sense and grammatical construction from one line of poetry to
the next. Milton’s Paradise Lost is notable for its use of enjambment, as seen in the following lines:
. . . .Or if Sion hill
Delight thee more, and Siloa’s brook that flow’d
Fast by the oracle of God, . . . .
45
20. extended metaphor- an implied analogy, or comparison, which is carried throughout a stanza or an
entire poem. In “The Bait,” John Donne compares a beautiful woman to fish bait and men to fish who
want to be caught by the woman. Since he carries these comparisons all the way through the poem,
these are considered “extended metaphors.”
21. euphony- a style in which combinations of words pleasant to the ear predominate. Its opposite is
cacophony. The following lines from John Keats’ Endymion are euphonious:
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
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, and health, and quiet breathing.
22. eye rhyme- rhyme that appears correct from spelling, but is half-rhyme or slant rhyme from the
pronunciation. Examples include “watch” and “match,” and “love” and “move.”
23. feminine rhyme- a rhyme of two syllables, one stressed and one unstressed, as “waken” and
“forsaken” and “audition” and “rendition.” Feminine rhyme is sometimes called double rhyme.
24. figurative language- writing that uses figures of speech (as opposed to literal language or that which
is actual or specifically denoted) such as metaphor, irony, and simile. Figurative language uses words
to mean something other than their literal meaning. “The black bat night has flown” is figurative, with the
metaphor comparing night and bat. “Night is over” says the same thing without figurative language.
25. free verse- poetry which is not written in a traditional meter but is still rhythmical. The poetry of Walt
Whitman is perhaps the best-known example of free verse.
26. heroic couplet- two end-stopped iambic pentameter lines rhymed aa, bb, cc with the thought usually
completed in the two-line unit. See the following example from Alexander Pope’s Rape of the Lock:
But when to mischief mortals bend their will,
How soon they find fit instruments of ill!
27. hyperbole- a deliberate, extravagant, and often outrageous exaggeration. It may be used for either
serious or comic effect. Macbeth is using hyperbole in the following lines:
. . . .No; this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.
28. imagery- the images of a literary work; the sensory details of a work; the figurative language of a
work. Imagery has several definitions, but the two that are paramount are the visual auditory, or tactile
images evoked by the words of a literary work or the images that figurative language evokes.
When
an AP question asks you to discuss imagery, you should look especially carefully at the sensory
details and the metaphors and similes of a passage. Some diction is also imagery, but not all
diction evokes sensory responses.
29. irony- the contrast between actual meaning and the suggestion of another meaning. Verbal irony is
a figure of speech in which the actual intent is expressed in words which carry the opposite meaning.
Irony is likely to be confused with sarcasm, but it differs from sarcasm in that it is usually lighter, less
harsh in its wording though in effect probably more cutting because of its indirectness. The ability to
recognize irony is one of the surer tests of intelligence and sophistication. Among the devices by which
irony is achieved are hyperbole and understatement.
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30. internal rhyme- rhyme that occurs within a line, rather than at the end. The following lines contain
internal rhyme:
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—
While I nodded, nearly napping. . suddenly there came a tapping . . . .
31. lyric poem- any short poem that presents a single speaker who expresses thoughts and feelings.
Love lyrics are common, but lyric poems have also been written on subjects as different as religion and
reading. Sonnets and odes are lyric poems.
32. masculine rhyme- rhyme that falls on the stressed and concluding syllables of the rhyme-words.
Examples include “keep” and “sleep,” “glow” and “no,” and “spell” and “impel.”
33. metaphor- a figurative use of language in which a comparison is expressed without the use of a
comparative term like “as,” “like,” or “than.” A simile would say, “night is like a black bat”; a metaphor
would say, “the black bat night.”
34. meter- the repetition of a regular rhythmic unit in a line of poetry. The meter of a poem emphasizes
the musical quality of the language and often relates directly to the subject matter of the poem. Each unit
of meter is known as a foot.
35. metonymy- a figure of speech which is characterized by the substitution of a term naming an object
closely associated with the word in mind for the word itself. In this way we commonly speak of the king
as the “crown,” an object closely associated with kingship.
36. mixed metaphors- the mingling of one metaphor with another immediately following with which the
first is incongruous. Lloyd George is reported to have said, “I smell a rat. I see it floating in the air. I
shall nip it in the bud.”
37. narrative poem- a non-dramatic poem which tells a story or presents a narrative, whether simple or
complex, long or short. Epics and ballads are examples of narrative poems.
38. octave- an eight-line stanza. Most commonly, octave refers to the first division of an Italian sonnet.
39. onomatopoeia- the use of words whose sound suggests their meaning. Examples are “buzz,”
“hiss,” or “honk.”
40. oxymoron- a form of paradox that combines a pair of contrary terms into a single expression. This
combination usually serves the purpose of shocking the reader into awareness. Examples include “wise
fool,” “sad joy,” and “eloquent silence.”
41. paradox- a situation or action or feeling that appears to be contradictory but on inspection turns out
to be true or at least to make sense. The following lines from one of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets include
paradoxes:
Take me to you, imprison me, for I
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
42. parallelism- a similar grammatical structure within a line or lines of poetry. Parallelism is
characteristic of Asian poetry, being notably present in the Psalms, and it seems to be the controlling
principle of the poetry of Walt Whitman, as in the following lines:
. . . .Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to
connect them.
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Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.
43. paraphrase- a restatement of an ideas in such a way as to retain the meaning while changing the
diction and form. A paraphrase is often an amplification of the original for the purpose of clarity.
44. personification- a kind of metaphor that gives inanimate objects or abstract ideas human
characteristics.
45. poetic foot- a group of syllables in verse usually consisting of one accented syllable and one or two
unaccented syllables associated with it. The most common type of feet are as follows:
iambic u /
trochaic / u
anapestic u u /
dactylic / u u
pyrrhic u u
spondaic / /
The following poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge illustrates all of these feet except the pyrrhic foot:
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.
46. pun- a play on words that are identical or similar in sound but have sharply diverse meanings. Puns
can have serious as well as humorous uses. An example is Thomas Hood’s:" They went and told the
sexton and the sexton tolled the bell.”
47. quatrain- a four-line stanza with any combination of rhymes.
48. refrain- a group of words forming a phrase or sentence and consisting of one or more lines repeated
at intervals in a poem, usually at the end of a stanza.
49. rhyme- close similarity or identity of sound between accented syllables occupying corresponding
positions in two or more lines of verse. For a true rhyme, the vowels in the accented syllables must be
preceded by different consonants, such as “fan” and “ran.”
50. rhyme royal- a seven-line stanza of iambic pentameter rhymed ababbcc, used by Chaucer and other
medieval poets.
51. rhythm- the recurrence of stressed and unstressed syllables. The presence of rhythmic patterns
lends both pleasure and heightened emotional response to the listener or reader.
52. sarcasm- a type of irony in which a person appears to be praising something but is actually insulting
it. Its purpose is to injure or to hurt.
53. satire- writing that seeks to arouse a reader’s disapproval of an object by ridicule. Satire is usually
comedy that exposes errors with an eye to correct vice and folly. Satire is often found in the poetry of
Alexander Pope.
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54. scansion- a system for describing the meter of a poem by identifying the number and the type(s) of
feet per line. Following are the most common types of meter:
monometer
one foot per line
dimeter
two feet per line
trimeter
three feet per line
tetrameter
four feet per line
pentameter
five feet per line
hexameter
six feet per line
heptameter
seven feet per line
octameter
eight feet per line
Using these terms, then, a line consisting of five iambic feet is called “iambic pentameter,” while a line
consisting of four anapestic feet is called “anapestic tetrameter.”
In order to determine the meter of a poem, the lines are “scanned,” or marked to indicate stressed and
unstressed syllables which are then divided into feet. The following line has been scanned:
u
/
u
/
u /
u
/
u
/
And still she slept an az ure- lid ded sleep
55. sestet- a six-line stanza. Most commonly, sestet refers to the second division of an Italian sonnet.
56. simile- a directly expressed comparison; a figure of speech comparing two objects, usually with
“like,” “as,” or “than.” It is easier to recognize a simile than a metaphor because the comparison is
explicit: my love is like a fever; my love is deeper than a well. (The plural of “simile” is “similes” not
“similies.”)
57. sonnet- normally a fourteen-line iambic pentameter poem. The conventional Italian, or Petrarchan
sonnet is rhymed abba, abba, cde, cde; the English, or Shakespearean, sonnet is rhymed abab, cdcd,
efef, gg.
58. stanza- usually a repeated grouping of three or more lines with the same meter and rhyme scheme.
59. strategy (or rhetorical strategy)- the management of language for a specific effect. The strategy or
rhetorical strategy of a poem is the planned placing of elements to achieve an effect. The rhetorical
strategy of most love poems is deployed to convince the loved one to return to the speaker’s love. By
appealing to the loved one’s sympathy, or by flattery, or by threat, the lover attempts to persuade the
loved one to love in return.
60. structure- the arrangement of materials within a work; the relationship of the parts of a work to the
whole; the logical divisions of a work. The most common units of structure in a poem are the line and
stanza.
61. style- the mode of expression in language; the characteristic manner of expression of an author.
Many elements contribute to style, and
if a question calls for a discussion of style or of
“stylistic techniques,” you can discuss diction, syntax, figurative language, imagery, selection of
detail, sound effects, and tone, using the ones that are appropriate.
62. symbol- something that is simultaneously itself and a sign of something else. For example, winter,
darkness, and cold are real things, but in literature they are also likely to be used as symbols of death.
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63. synecdoche- a form of metaphor which in mentioning a part signifies the whole. For example, we
refer to “foot soldiers” for infantry and “field hands” for manual laborers who work in agriculture.
64. syntax- the ordering of words into patterns or sentences. If a poet shifts words from the usual word
order, you know you are dealing with an older style of poetry or a poet who wants to shift emphasis onto
a particular word.
65. tercet- a stanza of three lines in which each line ends with the same rhyme.
66. terza rima- a three-line stanza rhymed aba, bcb, cdc,etc. Dante’s Divine Comedy is written in terza
rima.
67. theme- the main thought expressed by a work. In poetry, it is the abstract concept which is made
concrete through its representation in person, action, and image in the work.
68. tone- the manner in which an author expresses his or her attitude; the intonation of the voice that
expresses meaning. (Remember that the “voice” need not be that of the poet.) Tone is described by
adjectives, and the possibilities are nearly endless. Often a single adjective will be enough, and tone
may change from stanza to stanza or even line to line. Tone is the result of allusion, diction, figurative
language, imagery, irony, symbol, syntax, and style.
69. understatement- the opposite of hyperbole. It is a kind of irony that deliberately represents
something as being much less than it really is. For example, Macbeth, having been nearly hysterical
after killing Duncan, tells Lenox, “’Twas a rough night.”
70. villanelle- a nineteen-line poem divided into five tercets and a final quatrain. The villanelle uses only
two rhymes which are repeated as follows: aba, aba, aba, aba, aba, abaa. Line 1 is repeated entirely to
form lines 6, 12, and 18, and line 3 is repeated entirely to form lines 9, 15, and 19; thus, eight of the
nineteen lines are refrain. Dylan Thomas’s poem “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” is an
example of a villanelle.
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