Poetry 101: Introduction to Poetry

[Yvain Wintersong]

First learn the rules, then you can break them as much as you want.

Some poetry follows classical rules. Other poetry deviates from classical rules. Whether you want to follow them effectively or deviate from them effectively, you should know the classical rules before writing poetry.

This class will introduce meter, feet, and rhyme, three basic components of poetry, while subjecting you to a continuing barrage of corny jokes.

Meter

Poetic meter is simple. Just count the number of syllables per line. Unless you're doing something fancy, the number should stay pretty constant.

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely, and more temperate.

GOOD. Ten syllables on the first line. Ten syllables on the second line. Unsurprisingly, Shakespeare gets it right. If you know the rest of the poem, you can confirm that the rest of the lines also have ten syllables.

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Sweaty, and teeming with insects?

BAD. First line has ten syllables, second line as eight syllables. Try reciting this one to your sweetheart, and you'll end up single. Girls can be very pushy about poetic meter.

Feet

And that is the short and unsatisfying introduction to meter we can afford ourselves before moving on to the topic of feet.

Let's start with stress. Stress is the difference between "DA-dum" and "da-DUM". A limerick might have the following first line:

A poet from Hamburg, named Herman...

Recite that a few times. Hear how it rolls satisfyingly off the tongue. One can almost feel the streets of Hamburg beneath one's feet, hear the church bells...or perhaps not. But let us consider what other cities our friend Herman might be from.

He can't be from Timbuktu, that's for certain. Limericks use a meter with eightish or nineish syllables in the first line, and ten is just overkill. But what about somewhere closer to home, like Madrid?

A poet from Madrid named Herman...

If you recite this enough times, in the way you'd start a limerick, it sounds...strangely off. There is a disturbance in the Force. Why? Well, here are some cities that Herman can be from without breaking the poem: Hamburg, Warsaw, Krakow, Moscow, Salzburg, Athens. Test these, make sure they work. And here are some that he's not from: Madrid, Marseilles, Seville, Milan. What's the difference?

If you said "Eastern versus Western Europe," you're way off. The cities in the first list all go DA-dum. HAM-burg. WAR-saw. MOS-cow. The cities in the second list all go da-DUM. Ma-DRID. Mar-SEILLES. Mi-LAN.

a POet from HAMburg named HERman

Here, starting with syllable two, every third syllable is stressed. Take another limerick and you'll find the same thing:

there ONCE was a MAN from nanTUCKet

Try to recite any limerick, and you'll end up with more or less that same pattern. Why can't Herman be from Madrid? Because if we tried to cram that into a limerick, we'd be pronouncing it MA-drid, which sounds silly, or else the limerick would lose its rhythm.

A DA-dum pattern like Hamburg is called a "trochee", and a da-DUM pattern like "Madrid" is called an "iamb". Some poems are mostly trochees, and some are mostly iambs, but very few mix the two indiscriminately. Shakespeare mostly used iambs - when people talk about Shakespeare writing "iambic pentameter", they just mean his lines had five iambs each:

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time?
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely
The insolence of office, and the spurns
The pangs of despis'd love, the law's delay?
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin?

For WHO would BEAR the WHIPS and SCORNS of TIME. And so on. Say "FOR who WOULD bear THE whips AND scorns OF time?" and you sound like a crazy person. Try it, if no one's listening. You sound like a crazy person, don't you? Now here's a trochaic poem by Shelley:

Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number

RISE like LIons AFter SLUMber, and so on. Try to convert it to "Rise LIKE liONS afTER slumBER" and it won't work - the lion cannot lie down with the iamb.

Groan. All kidding aside, there are many lovely poetic feet worth learning. I'm a big fan of dactyls myself - those are DA-da-da, like in the limerick. S. T. Coleridge has an excellent mnemomic you can use to remember the names of all of them:

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's trisyllable.
Iambics march from short to long.
With a leap and a bound the swift Anapests throng.

Not only does the poem describe the different feet, not only is each line written in the style of the foot it describes, but the whole thing is a pun on the word "feet", which appeals to my own sensibilities nicely.

There are ways to mix and match poetic feet, but if you're not confident in your sense of rhythm, sticking to a single foot ensures you don't make any stupid mistakes.

Rhyme

Poems don't need to rhyme. Shakespeare wrote in rhyme-less blank verse and still did pretty well for himself. But rhyming does have a certain glamour to it. The poets who make millions off of a single pamphlet, the ones who get on all the talk shows, the ones surrounded by hordes of willing young girls desperate to bear their children; these poets all use rhyme to good effect.

Rhyme is not "two words that sound sort of alike". For example, returning to our friend Herman, the following does NOT rhyme properly:

A poet from Hamburg named Herman
Can't rhyme very well, but he's learnin'

A proper rhyme for "Herman" would be "lerman". Not very meaningful, but correct. Due to its context, however, I'll let that mistake pass. In fact, with sufficient contextual basis, it is on very rare occasions even permissible to break the rhyme scheme entirely:

A poet from Hamburg named Herman
Can't rhyme very well, but he's learnin'
Though he often offends
As he so often ends
Alle sein Limericks auf Deutsch.

Poets identify several kinds of rhyme. Masculine rhyme ("single rhyme") is one syllable rhyming with one syllable. A poem using masculine rhyme (these next two are by Piet Hein):

It ought to be plain
How little you gain
By getting excited and vexed
You'll always be late for the previous train
And always in time for the next

Plain - gain - train. Vexed - Next. One syllable. One syllable. These rhymes are hard to mess up, though some people manage. (No, you may not drop 's's - "loves" does not rhyme with "above"). Next we have feminine rhyme - aka two syllable rhyme. Behold:

As eternity is reckoned,
There's a lifetime in a second

Feminine rhyme has a lot of advantages - to me, at least, a good feminine rhyme invariably sounds witty, even when the content doesn't make sense. It's also a little harder to pull off. The following does NOT work:

John slept at a sleazy hotel
And got whacked by a drug cartel.

Feminine rhymes work best when the first syllable is changed and the second stays the same. Second changed and first the same doesn't sound as good. Here's a better version of the poem above:

John slept with Charles Martel
And got whacked by a drug cartel

...except that it raises more questions than it answers, especially to historians concerned with the history of medieval sexuality.

There's another thing you have to watch out for. This, too is wrong:

I love to use technology
But sometimes it can be tricky

Here the rhyme's fine, but in making the rhyme, you've screwed up the feet. You've got to pronounce tricky as trick-Y, which isn't how you should pronounce it. The only form I can think of where this is okay would be one of those military "I don't know but I've been told" chants, in which everyone's shouting so loud it doesn't make a difference.

This is important enough to re-emphasize. Stuff that rhymes should have the same foot. You may NOT break rhythm in order to fit a good rhyme in. The gods of poetry are harsh, merciless gods, and the excuse of "Oh, I really wanted that rhyme" will not appease them.

Last, we have the legendary "triple rhyme", in which words of three syllables are made, through some dark thaumaturgy, to rhyme with each other. I don't know if it has a fancy gender name, although I like to call it "hermaphroditic rhyme". If you can pull this one off properly, you're well on your way to becoming the Poet Laureate. Here's a classic triple rhyme:

I shoot the hippopotamus with bullets made of platinum
Because, if I used normal ones, his hide would surely flatten 'em

Gilbert and Sullivan managed to write an entire song, "I Am The Very Model Of A Modern-Major General" in triple rhyme, after which they departed the mortal plane and achieved godhood in a burst of transcendent light seen as far away as Glasgow:

I know our mythic history, King Arthur's and Sir Caradoc's
I answer hard acrostics; I've a pretty taste for paradox
I quote in elegaic all the crimes of Heliogabalus
In conics I can floor peculiarities parabolous
I tell undoubted Rafaels from Gerard Dows and Zoffanies
I know the croaking chorus from the Frogs of Aristophanes
And I can hum a fugue if I have heard the music's din 'afore
And whistle all the airs from that infernal nonsense "Pinafore"

By the way, at this point, you should be able to tell me that the song uses iambic octameter - eight iambs stuck together.

That pinnacle of the art seems like a good place to end. If there's enough interest, I will post a more advanced class, giving pointers on style, and when it might or might not be okay to break rhythm and meter, and describing some more specific poetic forms like sonnets (and I'll only know if there's interest if you write a post telling me there is). For now, I leave you with two slightly contradictory quotes from Alexander Pope:

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance
As those move easiest who have learned to dance

Music is like poetry - in each
Are nameless graces, which no art can teach
And which a master hand alone can reach

Your homework is to write a poem and post it here. If you need a subject, write about your subdivision.

[Kaiser Hasan I]

This is an excellent guide! Good work, I was wondering if you wanted to mediate the "Longest Poem Ever" Thread concept? For each additional post in the thread, we'd need someone to score the latest. I suspect that I will issue an award to the most accomplished contributor.

[Andreas the Wise]

Good work Yvain, as Minister, I'll just say carry on ...

[Erik Mortis]

To the wiki with it would also proly be a good response...