Love & Symbolism Part II Intro to Poetry

1. Chapter Three Literature: Reading to Write Love & SymbolismPart IIIntro to Poetry

2. Oh god…poems. • I know that’s what you’re all thinking, but relax. • Poems do much of the same work that fiction does, just in a different way and in a different form. • Poetry uses the following elements to convey meaning in a usually (though not always) small space: • Symbols • Imagery • Motifs • Plot & action • Metaphors

3. How do I read a poem? • Don’t let the format fool you. • Read the poem just as you would a story or play. • Read it through once and address the following answers: • What’s happening? (plot) • Who’s the narrator/speaker? • Are there any characters? Who are they? • What’s the speaker’s tone like? (their attitude) • Where is it set? • How does the speaker use imagery? What do they focus on? • How does the poem sound?

4. Well this doesn’t seem so bad… • You aren’t limited only to these questions. • Likely you’ll want to consider figures of speech, metaphors, similes, personification, rhymes, alliteration, irony…. • There’s a wealth of elements at your disposal. • All of these come together to help you find meaning in a poem.

5. Yet… • You’ll also want to consider the type of poem you’re reading. They aren’t all the same: • Sonnet: a fixed poem of 14 lines. • It can be the Petrarchan model with an 8-line stanza and a 6-line stanza (end rhymes are usually abbaabba); or it can be a • Shakespearean model with three quatrains and a couplet (with end-rhymes like abab, cdcd, etc). • Or you can have poems that use certain stanza styles: • Couplets: line pairs that rhyme • Tercets: three-line stanzas • Triplets: three rhyming stanzas • Etc (see LRW page 105)

6. Li Ho, “A Beautiful Girl Combs Her Hair” • Read it. • Who is the speaker? • What characters are present? • Where is this set? • What’s happening? • We’re told that the woman in the poem is beautiful. How does the speaker use imagery to convey this? What images are used? • What’s the relationship between speaker and his object?

7. Does the speaker use any symbols, metaphors, or figures of speech to help get his meaning across? What are they? • If we want to consider the central theme of this poem to be love, how does the poem support this theme • How does the speaker characterize love? • Think back to “The Necklace”; we talked about how women are usually associated with beauty, either as objects of beauty themselves, or in relation to other objects, ideas, or things of beauty. Is this the case here? • What do lines 23-24 suggest? • Why is this woman's beauty so upsetting?

8. Sir Thomas Wyatt • Wyatt's poem is what we call a closed form poem or a sonnet. • Compare this with Li Ho's poem which is a pastiche of imagery. • Wyatt's poems are a challenge to courtly love that was popular in his day. • Also unlike convention, he focuses on the lover instead of the beloved (the woman) which is again different from Li Ho. • In what other ways does Wyatt's poem contradict Ho's? How does Wyatt's poem contradict itself?

9. Wyatt also uses certain formal moves to convey meaning and emotion: • Consider how he balances his phrasing: • Antithesis with contrasting ideas like “I find...I fear...I fly” • These lines break in the middle, they pause and divide, mirroring the internal division and tension of the speaker.

10. Shakespeare and Sonnets • William Shakespeare is not only known for his plays but also for his sonnets about love and beauty. • Sonnets usually express intense, concentrated feelings with an argument, proposition, or generalization about a particular theme or idea. • At the end, there is a final application or reversal of the idea or theme being explored. • What Shakespeare does in his two sonnets here is celebrate love while commenting on the poetry written about the subject; they are revisions of Petrarchan poems in which he celebrates his unrequited love for the ideal woman (Laura). • Here he uses argument through word play to present a problem and reach a conclusion.

11. Sonnet #18 • Analogies (first two quatrains) compare the lover to a summer's day (the lover is the tenor and the summer's day is the vehicle). • He moves from this celebration, rejecting it at line 9 and the third quatrain (“but”) which signals the problem he's presenting to us.

12. Robert Herrick, “Upon Julia’s Clothes” • Again we have a poem that focuses on the beloved, the focus on the object of desire. • Notice how Herrick's poem is structured grammatically and how time is registered. • Herrick's rhetorical device of choice here is the synecdoche: his beloved's clothes become her, represent her, and embody her; a kind of hyperbole, a kind of figure of speech. • How does he use metaphor here?

13. Look at Sharon Olds’s and Beth Ann Fennelly’s poems on pages 65-67. • Read them.