THE ELEMENTS OF POETRY: STRUCTURE AND POETIC FORMS

Poets give structure to their poems in two overlapping ways:

1) by organizing ideas according to a logical plan and

2) by creating a pattern of sounds.

The poem can be divided into units, each of which can have a pattern of end rhyme, the whole poem can be arranged rhetorically—that is. by ideas. Each unit can elaborates a point, and each point follows logically from the preceding one.

Perhaps the most common sound device by which poets create structure is end rhyme, and any pattern of end rhyme is called a rhyme scheme. Rhyme scheme helps to establish another structural device, the stanza, which is physically separated from other stanzas by extra spaces and usually represents one idea.

Stanzas typically have the same structure: the same number of lines, length of lines, metrical patterns, and rhyme schemes. Poets, of course, can create any rhyme scheme or stanza form they choose, but they often work instead within the confines of already established poetic structures. These are called fixed firms. Stanzas that conform to no traditional limits are called nonce forms. The most famous fixed form in English is the sonnet. Like other fixed forms, the sonnet provides ready-made structural divisions by which a poet can organize ideas. But it also challenges poets to moid unwieldy material into an unyielding structure. The result is a tension between material and form that is pleasing both to poet and reader.

All sonnets have fourteen lines of iambic pentameter. There are two kinds of sonnets, both named for their most famous practitioners. A Shakespearean sonnet rhymes abab/cdcd/efef/gg and has a structural division of three quatrains (each containing four lines) and a couplet. A Petrarchan sonner rhymes abbaabba in the octave (the first eight lines) and cdecde in the sestet (the last six lines).

Poets often vary the pattern of end rhyme in these kinds of sonnets, and this is especially true of the sestet in the Petrarchan sonnet. Note, for example, the following sonnet by Wordsworth THE WORLD IS TOO MUCH WITH US. Each kind of sonnet has a turn, a point in the poem at which the poet shifts from one meaning or mood to another. The turn in the Shakespearean sonnet occurs between Lines 12 and 13 (just before the couplet). The turn in the Petrarchan sonnet occurs between the octave and the sestet. In both forms, the part of the poem before the turn delineates a problem or tension; the part after the turn offers some resolution to or comment on the problem, and it releases the tension.

Date: 2015-01-11; view: 971