Poetry is often called a fine art. Poetry is compact—the idea is to say a lot with relatively few words—and as a result, individual words matter. As a reader, you may be assured that the poet has chosen every word carefully. Every line, every stanza in a poem is designed to evoke associations and emotions. If you read and re-read a poem for analysis, your full attention is required. And ideally, you should have a chance to hear poems—hear them performed and spoken as they have been for centuries!
Poetry is meant to be performed. Effective poems work with sounds as well as with meanings. Patterns of sound or rhythm are exploited to make a poem memorable. In fact, the early, epic poems that have survived into our modern age, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh from Mesopotamia or Homer’s Odyssey from the early Greek diaspora, were composed in verse in no small part to help early entertainers remember their acts.
Epic poems were composed in an era when few people were literate. People didn’t read; they listened to stories and myths as recounted by the artists of their times. When early balladeers went from court to court to sing about heroic exploits, they used many poetic devices as memory aids. Today’s rap and spoken word artists use the same techniques, particularly when they improvise a spontaneous rap. Just like good epic poetry, good rap relies on patterns of related sounds, a good meter (related to beats in music) and repeated stanzas to catch and keep our attention. Let’s examine the building blocks that go into creating art with words!
Performative Essentials
In every poem, someone is speaking, a speaker who presents a story, or a meditation, or a reflection about an experience. For the most part, readers should not assume that the speaker is the poet. Think of the speaker as a guide, a dramatic role, a persona adopted for the purpose of conveying an insight or sharing commentary about the human condition. Every poem has, also, a dramatic situation: someone is speaking perhaps directly to someone else about a specific circumstance. The speaker may be sharing joy about a deeply felt love, or grief about its loss, or a need to hold on to its memory despite the bittersweet emotions that come with it. Sometimes a physical setting is specified – a time of day or year or a specific time of history; at other times, the poem evokes its dramatic situation more obliquely.
People often have misconceptions about the language of poetry. They think the language must be “flowery” and unreal. They also think that poems have to rhyme. Neither expectation is true, though you might find rather elegant (and mystifying) language and elaborate rhyme schemes as well as rhythmic speech (meter) in older poetry. Much 20th and 21st century poetry is not particularly rhythmic, and it often does not follow a traditional rhyme scheme. Rhyme is making something of a come-back, mind you, perhaps due to the influence of rap music and hip-hop. Sometimes readers are confused by the word order or syntax in a poem, which can be different from “normal” spoken English. Sentence structure can be inverted or words can be left out in order to suit a poet’s purposes.
Word choices in a poem are supremely important. Poems establish their own diction, a pattern of word choices used in a particular poem or larger poetic work that becomes recognizable. The words chosen can be concrete (specific) or abstract (general ideas). Concrete word choices often involve imagery, the physical representation of something that can be picked up by the senses – seen, heard, touched, tasted, or smelled. Some imagery can be figurative – meaning that two things are being explicitly or implicitly compared. At times an image can take on a symbolic meaning, but it is best to avoid leaping into symbolism before you are fully aware of the literal level of a poem. In other words, be sure you know what is happening before you try to figure out what it means.
Diction and Tone
From the whole of language, authors carefully select words and grammatical constructions that suit their purpose, and this selection process results in a particular diction, often one distinctive enough to be recognizable across a particular author’s writings. Let’s start with a simple example from everyday life to illustrate the impact of word choice: depending on the situation, speakers may call someone a police officer or a cop. Both terms may refer to the same person, but they do not mean the same thing. Poets are sensitive to the differences implied by each choice, and will work on their texts until each word fits.
In “The Sound of the Sea” for example, Henry Longfellow chooses words that tend to amplify, to suggest large forces at work: rush, sweep, deep, multiplied, mountain, roar, rushing (Lines 3 through 11). This creates an impression of the ocean as powerful, but that power inspires rather than frightens. Ted Hughes describes another natural force in “Pike,” and uses words that suggest quite a different attitude: tigering, killers, malevolent, flies, submarine, horror, heat struck, gloom, jaws, fangs … (Lines 2 through 13). Hughes portrays darker forces of nature rather than awe-inspiring ones, and his diction corresponds to his purpose.
The overall impression created by a poem’s diction also conveys an overall tone, a central attitude easily inferred as the poem is recited. To return to our previous example, Longfellow’s tone is somewhat otherworldly and awe-struck, whereas Hughes’ tone reflects his growing fear of the awakening “darkness beneath night’s darkness” channeled through his encounters with pikes (Line 43). A poem’s tone can be playful, awe-struck, eerie, angry, ironic. In some notable cases, the poet may play with tone and use a sudden reversal at the end of the poem that may recast the meaning of the entire text. William Shakespeare’s sonnets often have that quality, with “Sonnet 130” a particularly striking example. For twelve of the sonnet’s fourteen lines, ironic comparisons seem to disparage rather than praise the “mistress” who has inspired Shakespeare, but after listing nothing but short-comings, he writes, “And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare / As any she belied with false compare” (Lines 15 – 16).
Figurative Language
Poets try to pack their texts with meaning, and figurative language is one of their most powerful tools. In addition to communicating on a literal level, words often imply attitudes and associations that amplify their communicative force. To return to an earlier example, the word cop means not only police officer, but implies a different attitude towards police work and is associated with a less formal style of speaking. If we were to re-write Ice Tea’s “Cop Killer” as “Police Officer Killer,” the result would not only sound grammatically questionable, but also odd and even a little confused. Is the speaker trying to say the police officer is a killer? As you can see, the meaning of the (in)famous title changes completely with just one word choice.
Figurative language can be grouped into several commonly used poetic tools: similes, metaphors, imagery, and symbolism. Let’s briefly review each of these.
Similes make an explicit comparison between two items from different classes using a connective such as like, as, or than, or by a verb such as appears or seems. If the two objects are from the same class, for example, “Tokyo is like Los Angeles,” no simile is present. Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 130” contains two (anti)similes in the first two lines:
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red; (Lines 1 – 2)
Another favorite example comes from Muhammad Ali’s characterization of a good boxer: “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.”
Metaphors create the same connections and comparisons, but without explicit connectives such as like or verbs such as appear. We can continue with Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 30” to find more metaphors:
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head; (Lines 3 – 4)
Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” is often interpreted as entirely metaphoric; while he writes about “two roads [diverging] in a yellow wood” (Line 1) and goes on to describe the roads with concrete physical details, readers rarely think this poem is about roads in the woods. Instead, most readers conclude that the roads represent two choices at a critical point in the speaker’s life, and interpret many of the details in light of that central metaphor.
Imagery evokes concrete physical details—something that can be seen, heard, touched, tasted, or smelled. Concrete sensory details tend to wake up a text—give them a vivid quality that catch the readers’ attention. Hughes uses some striking imagery in “Pike”: The pike’s color is described as “green tigering the gold” (Line 2) the pond is likened to “a bed of emerald” (Line 6) and “an amber cavern of weeds” (Line 12).
U2’s 1987 song “Bullet the Blue Sky” opens with “a howling wind” and “a stinging rain” that “[drives] nails” into “souls on the tree of pain” (Lines 1 – 2). That final image of nails being driven into something, even something as abstract as souls, makes readers (and listeners, since this is a song) sit up and take notice.
In addition to livening up texts, imagery also frequently allows poets (and lyricists) to take advantage of meanings associated with certain words over time. In Hughes’ “green tigering the gold” (Line 2) the word tigering links the pike with the wild, potentially dangerous quality of tigers. The use of “nails” and “tree of pain” in “Bullet the Blue Sky” evokes Christian associations that signal the song’s theme of a struggle between forces of good (Sky) and evil (Bullet) already present in the song’s title. This use of imagery can cross over into symbolism, the final form of figurative language discussed here.
A symbol is an image loaded with significance beyond its literal meaning. It does not simply stand for something else; it is both itself and stands for something beyond itself. An everyday example of a symbol would be any national flag. The US flag, with its fifty stars and thirteen red and white stripes, stands for an evolving USA that started with thirteen former colonies and has now reached fifty member states. Some symbols, like religious or national symbols, have become conventionalized, but writers find new ways to enliven them. That’s what Wing Tek Lum does in “Minority Poem,” where he asserts, “we’re just as American / as apple pie … if you count / the leftover peelings” (Lines 2 – 4). Similarly, Yehuda Amichai’s “An Arab Shepherd Is Searching for His Goat on Mount Zion” recasts the story of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac. In Amichai’s retelling, neither the father nor the shepherd wants to sacrifice son or goat, and when together they find both, “[their] voices came back inside [them], laughing and crying” (Line 12). It is a new form of redemption, perhaps one suited to the present.
Prosody
Sound effects in poems and songs, including verse structure, rhythm, meter, rhyme, and patterns of related sounds across lines are called prosody. Work with sounds, meter, and verse is what turns poetic language into fine art, and a few technical terms merit a brief overview.
Most poetry in English has a pattern of stressed or accented sounds alternating with unstressed ones. This pattern is called meter. Iambic meter, where one unstressed syllable is followed by one stressed one, is the most common pattern in English speech, and it is used quite frequently in English-language poems. Skillfully developed meter produces rhythm, recurrences at equal intervals that help structure the flow of larger units of the poem, such as stanzas. Rhythm most obviously depends on pauses, but other language choices will influence its realization.
Poems can have end-stopped lines, that is, lines composed of a complete thought or syntactical unit. Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 130” features end-stopped lines. Alternatively, poems can have run-on lines, also called enjambment, where the line break does not correspond with the end of the thought. Hughes’ “Pike” is structured along run-on lines. Finally, poets work with sounds within and across lines and stanzas.
The most well-known poetic use of sound is rhyme, or the alignment of end-of-line sounds. Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” presents an effective recent use of end-rhyme with its a b a a b pattern repeated over four stanzas. Like other forms of repetition, a rhyme scheme has mnemonic qualities, and that may be a principal reason for its widespread use in non-literate societies. It is important to remember that the first English-speaking societies in England, Scotland, and their eventual colonies were largely non-literate for centuries. And with our ever-increasing use of videos and graphic symbols, we may be headed to a new, mixed form of literacy that again puts a premium on mnemonic sound repetitions. Rhythm and rhyme may once again rule supreme.
In addition to end rhyme, poets will also make use of internal rhyme, that is, of rhyming within the same lines. The first line of Bruce Springsteen’s “Streets of Philadelphia” contains the internal rhyme “I couldn’t tell what I felt” (Line 1), and some of his other songs, such as “Born in the USA,” make use of both internal and end rhyme:
I had a brother at Khe Sahn fighting off the Viet Cong
They’re still there, he’s all gone (Verse 4)
Alliteration, assonance, and consonance are other sound effects often exploited by poets. Alliteration is the repetition of initial sounds (“Pike, three inches long, perfect / Pike in all parts” – Hughes, Lines 1 – 2), assonance is the repetition of identical vowels preceded and followed by different consonants (tide and hide rhyme in Longfellow, with assonance relating tide and mine), and consonance is the repetition of identical consonant sounds with differing vowels in words in proximity (fail—feel; rough—roof).
To re-cap: how do you read a poem? Read it aloud, several times. Pay attention to the sound as well as the words on the page. Keep in mind that even when a poem is translated, many translators work hard to incorporate poetic techniques that reflect some original sound work. Then ask yourself what is the dramatic situation, who is speaking about what to whom? See if you can paraphrase it to yourself. Then look at the difference between your paraphrase and the poem. What is most interesting or unusual in the poem’s word-choices? Does the poem rhyme or is it free verse? Do you see imagery? Figurative language? Is the diction concrete or abstract?