Poetic Form and Meaning

1. Poetic Form and Meaning A guide for Anthology C and unseen poetry

2. Features of form: • Rhyme • Metre • Stanzas • Refrains • Title

3. Some popular forms in English: • Ballad / song / hymn • Sonnet • Ode • Free verse • Villanelle • Forms using iambic pentameter • Elegy

4. Ballads • Regular rhyme scheme e.g. abab, abcb • Usually quatrains (but not always) • Trimeter and tetrameter associated with ‘ballad metre’ • Simple diction • Narrative (tell a story) rather than lyric (focus on emotions) • Objective (3rd-person narrators) rather than subjective • May contain dialogue and archetypal figures • One of the oldest poetic forms in the English language

5. ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ and ‘The Tyger’ • Both have a regular rhyme scheme and are in quatrains • Both have ‘ballad metre’ • Both use simple diction • HOWEVER: both are subjective and lyric

6. Ballad and meaning • Both the ballads in the anthology are subversive • They might purport to tell a story but focus instead on emotions and abstract ideas • Blake uses it ironically to convey the simplicity and innocence of a child’s sense of wonder (the poem originally came from his Songs of Innocence and Experience) at something incomprehensible • Keats uses the form ironically to present the complexity of the conventional medieval ‘romance’ tale • However, their use of the form is significant and conventional in one way: • Rhyme and simple diction make both poems memorable

7. Further reading • William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience • Lyrical Ballads (Wordsworth and Coleridge) – groundbreaking ballads with simple diction and complex philosophical and social ideas • Langston Hughes, various ballads – very simple language to express anger at political and social injustice in C20th • Emily Dickinson’s ballads for ironic use of simple diction and metre to convey sceptical or abstract ideas

8. Sonnet • 14 lines long • Usually has a regular rhyme scheme • Usually written in iambic pentameter • Emerged from print culture during the Renaissance • Has associations with courtly virtues, love, praise etc. • Usually consists of an octet and a sestet • Volta is the turning point • The rhyming couplet is often a resolution or affirmation

9. Sonnet and meaning • A Petrarchan sonnet, Rossetti’s poem follows formal conventions of length, metre, and rhyme • Shakespeare’s sonnets deviate from the Petrarchan model (rhyming couplet, rhyme scheme) but retain the conventional subject matter of love • Both poets use the form to transcend conventional love poetry • Rossetti:sonnets became integral to Romantic poetry and linked poets with giants such as Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, and, later, Wordsworth the use of the form therefore also elevates the poet • Shakespeare uses the intricacy of the form to demonstrate the superiority of the sonneteer • Rossetti uses it to subvert idealistic love/romance and foreground the individual within the relationship

10. Further reading • Shakespeare’s various sonnets – praise, love, time, immortality • Romantic sonnets – e.g. Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge

11. Ode • The ultimate classical lyric form • Conventionally used by Greek poets to glorify what they saw as important people or topics • Enjoyed a major resurgence during the Romantic period • Variations: Pindaric, Horation, and irregular • Pindaric: strophe, antistrophe, and epode • Horation: one stanza form repeated • Irregular: no formal pattern

12. Ode and meaning • Odes are usually written on a famous person, event or a virtue • Many Romantic,modern, and contemporary poets subvert this by focusing on subjective experience • However, most are conventional in their attempt to immortalise their subjects

13. Further reading: famous Romantic odes • John Keats, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, ‘Ode to Psyche’, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, ‘Ode to Melancholy’, ‘To Autumn’ • P. B. Shelley, ‘Ode to the West Wind’ • William Wordsworth, ‘Immortality Ode’ • S. T. Coleridge, ‘Dejection: an Ode’

14. Free verse • No set formal patterns i.e. rhyme scheme, metre, line/stanza length • May or may not contain rhyme – frequently uses internal or half-rhyme • However, it is carefully structured • As old as the Bible but became increasingly popular with Modernism; it is therefore seen as a fairly new form (since the early C20th) • Free verse is often consciously political; by ‘freeing’ verse from poetic constraints, poets are making a statement about being politically, socially, or emotionally ‘free’

15. Free verse and meaning • Almost all the free verse poems in the Anthologyuse free verse to explore feelings of displacement, confusion, or isolation • Short/abrupt lines may reflect a fragmented sense of being • The use of form reflects a negative aspect of freedom i.e. to the point where one does not belong to a specific place or time • Free verse is one of the most popular forms for contemporary poetry e.g. your unseen • Free verse rarely praises or elevates topics; instead it typically magnifies subjective experience • The irregularity of it often reflects the uncertainties of modern life

16. Iambic pentameter • Typical forms involve blank verse, heroic couplets, and dramatic monologue • Five metrical feet per line with an unstressed/stressed syllable pattern (ti-tum-ti-tum-ti-tum-ti-tum-ti-tum) • Seen to mirror conversation and ‘natural’ speech • Emerged at the end of the medieval period  print culture • Some of the greatest works in literature use this metre

17. Pentameter and meaning • Heroic couplets usually used for satire and witty poems • Because it is seen to mirror speech, it is conversational and often subjective or personal e.g. ‘Hide and Seek’, ‘If’ • As the metre favoured by Shakespeare, it can reflect aspects of drama e.g. ‘My Last Duchess with its dramatic monologue form clearly presents a ‘character’

18. Further reading • Robert Browning frequently uses this metre/form to tell a story • Sophie Hannah, ‘Postcard From a Travel Snob’ – as with ‘My Last Duchess’, it uses the form to show how deluded the speaker is • Wordsworth, The Prelude – the first autobiographical poem • Coleridge, conversation poems – use the metre to form an intimate tone • Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales – drama and narrative • Any Shakespeare play! • Carol Ann Duffy – famous contemporary poet who frequently uses the metre

19. Elegy • Can follow any formal pattern but is characterised by its focus on death • Elegies are usually written as a memorial to a person or group of people • However, a poem can bean elegy for a place or time period that is no longer the way it was • Some poems might not be, strictly speaking, elegies but may have an elegiac tone

20. Further reading • Thomas Gray, ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ – classic elegy and inspiration for Romantics and Moderns • Wordsworth’s ‘Lucy’ poems – elegiac ballads for an unknown subject • Tennyson, ‘In Memoriam’ • John Milton, ‘Lycidas’ • W. H. Auden, ‘Funeral Blues’

21. Villanelle • French poetic form adapted from a medieval Italian folk form about rural life (oral form, so designed to be memorable) • Five tercets and a quatrain (ABA ABAABAABAABA ABAA) • Has a clear rhyme scheme and is repetitive • Features refrain of two lines and so is ideal for emphasising an argument powerfully

22. Further reading • Elizabeth Bishop, ‘One Art’ – a famous modern villanelle containing black humour • Sylvia Plath, ‘Mad Girl’s Love Song’ • Theodore Roethke, ‘The Waking’