Eighth Grade Education - POETRY

[Carol]

bboyminn:
> 
> Thanks for the Poems, both with very vivid imagery.

Carol responds:

You're welcome. You can find more poems by both poets online (I linked
you to a page of Whitman), or just pick up a copy of their works next
time you're in a bookstore that has a poetry section.

bboyminn: 
> My problem isn't know about the internal structure and rhythm of
poetry. It is that the teachers I have in my many small
> town schools never took it beyond that. When teaching rhythm and
metre of poems, the "...strict da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM
rhythm..." was so heavily emphasize and never countered by the same
poem in natural voice, that it is totally ingrained in my head. Which
means I can't read a poem without reverting back to the primitive
overemphasized 'da-DUM da-DUM', and it makes it difficult to
understand the poem when it isn't in natural flowing language. <snip>

Carol responds:

Granted, it's hard to get past the rhythm when you're dealing with
Poe, who *wants( you to feel those trochees pounding in your head.
It's easier with iambic poetry, especially when it doesn't have
end-stopped lines (sentences and lines stopping in the same place, for
example Pope's anti-female couplet (don't get mad at me, anybody!):

Nothing so true as what you once let fall,
"Most women have no characters at all."

Except for the slightly irregular first line (the first foot is a
trochee; the rest are iambs), it's easy to get carried away by the
rhythma and not hear what Pope is saying. (He deserves a witty rebuke
from a woman, but that's beside the point.)

But a lot of poetry is "enjambed"--that is, the phrase or sentence
doesn't end with the poetic line and is carried into the next line.
Those poems should be read with pauses at the caesuras, that is, the
natural pauses (often marked by commas) within the line. Even
Shelley's poem, with its old-fashioned diction (word choice) and
occasional inverted sentence structure, doesn't sound mechanical,
partly because he deliberately includes slant rhymes and slightly
irregular metric feet, but also because of the enjambment; the end of
the line doesn't mark the end of the thought. If you read these lines
out loud, pausing at the commas and after "thou" and "clarion,"
emphasizing the same words that you would emphasize if it were prose,
you'll sense the rhythm and other sound poems without being enslaved
to them. (Shelley, of course, was very familiar with all those poetic
debices and knew exactly what he was doing, crafting almost by
instinct because he knew them so well.)

                                O thou 
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed 

The wingèd seeds, where they lie cold and low, 
Each like a corpse within its grave, until 
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow 

Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth,

But even end-stopped lines in the hands of a master can sound natural,
especially if they happen to be blank verse (unrhymed iambic
pentameter) from a Shakespeare play. Here's Romeo's soliloquy beneath
Juliet's balcony. You've read it before, but it's famous for good reason:

But soft! what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun!--
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
Who is already sick and pale with grief,
That thou her maid art far more fair than she:
Be not her maid, since she is envious;
Her vestal livery is but sick and green,
And none but fools do wear it; cast it off.--
It is my lady; O, it is my love!
O, that she knew she were!--
She speaks, yet she says nothing: what of that?
Her eye discourses, I will answer it.--
I am too bold, 'tis not to me she speaks:
Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven,
Having some business, do entreat her eyes
To twinkle in their spheres till they return.
What if her eyes were there, they in her head?
The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars,
As daylight doth a lamp; her eyes in heaven
Would through the airy region stream so bright
That birds would sing and think it were not night.--
See how she leans her cheek upon her hand!
O that I were a glove upon that hand,
That I might touch that cheek!

Just try reading it aloud as if you were a romantic teenage boy in
love with a girl he's not allowed to speak to or associate with,
emphasizing the words in a natural way (and not paying too much
attention to the grotesqueness of Juliet's eyes twinkling in the
heavens while two bright stars fill their place!). If only teenage
boys spent their time composing love poetry these days. (Then, again,I
wouldn't want to be Romeo's mother, worrying about him and his friends
duelling in the streets with real swords. Puts duelling with wands in
the corridors of Hogwarts to shame in terms of danger.

Carol, who had nearly forgotten how enjoyable poetry can be