Prosody concerns the measure in which poems are written. There are three kinds of poems, prosodically speaking:
poems in counted lines (where lines have a regular number of beats);
poems in free verse (where lines have an irregular number of beats); and
poems in prose (usually a short symbolic paragraph).
This appendix is concerned with poems in counted lines and poems in free verse. Since free verse is a relatively recent form (Walt Whitman is the earliest significant American poet of free verse), we will take up counted poetry first.
Poems in counted lines are written in units we call feet. A foot consists of one stressed syllable (one “beat,” to use the musical term), usually accompanied by one or two unstressed syllables. We represent a stressed syllable by an accent (´) and an unstressed syllable by a symbol called a breve (˘).
Here is an example of a line with four feet:
Whose woóds / these áre / I thínk / I knów
The number of feet in a line gives the line its (Greek-derived) name, and tells you how wide the line is. Natural intonation makes you stress some words and leave others unstressed, helping you to see how many beats are in the line. We characterize a line by how many stresses (beats) exist in it: the word “meter” (meaning measure) is the general name for the width of a counted line:
one beat per line = monometer (from Greek meaning “one,” as in “monologue”);
two beats per line = dimeter (from Greek meaning “two,” as in “dialogue”);
three beats per line = trimeter (from Greek meaning “three,” as in “triangle”);
four beats per line = tetrameter (from Greek meaning “four,” as in “tetrahedron”);
five beats per line = pentameter (from Greek meaning “five,” as in “pentagon”);
six beats per line = hexameter (from Greek meaning “six,” as in “hexagram”);
seven beats per line = heptameter (from Greek meaning “seven,” as in “heptathlon”); and
eight beats per line = octameter (from Greek meaning “eight,” as in “octopus”).
Most poems written in English have lines four or five beats wide. Shakespeare wrote all of his plays in pentameter lines five beats wide (though he also inserted prose and short songs from time to time).
When you are looking to see how many beats are in a line, it helps sometimes to see how many syllables are in the line. Ten-syllable lines tend to have five beats each; eight-syllable lines tend to have four beats each. But it is still natural intonation that tells you where to put the stresses:
When Í / see bír / ches bénd / to léft / and ríght [ten syllables, five beats]
Gólden / láds and / gírls all / múst [seven syllables, four beats]
Here are samples of six of the line-widths. It helps to read these aloud, so that you can hear the beats.
1. MONOMETER (one beat per line, a rare meter), as in the little poem called “Fleas”:
Adam
Had ’em.
2. DIMETER (two beats), which is likewise rare:
Take her up tenderly,
Lift her with care,
Fashioned so slenderly,
Young and so fair.
—THOMAS HOOD, “The Bridge of Sighs”
3. TRIMETER (three beats):
It is time that I wrote my will;
I choose upstanding men
That climb the streams until
The fountain leap, and at dawn
Drop their cast at the side
Of dripping stone; I declare
They shall inherit my pride.
—W. B. YEATS, “The Tower”
4. TETRAMETER (four beats):
Whose woods these are I think I know
His house is in the village though,
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
—ROBERT FROST, “Stopping by Woods”
5. PENTAMETER (five beats):
The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthens to the ground,
Man comes and tills the soil and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.
—ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, “Tithonus”
6. HEXAMETER (six beats), which is sometimes called an Alexandrine (from the French usage) and which is rare in English verse:
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made.
—W. B. YEATS, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”
The common meters (line-widths) have been trimeter, tetrameter, and pentameter, used singly or in combination.
RHYTHM
You have probably noticed that the lilts (swings) in each of the above examples of line-width differ. That is because the lines are written in different rhythms. Two dimeter poems can sound very different from each other because they are written in two different rhythms. You can see this by comparing Hood’s “The Bridge of Sighs,” given above as an example of dimeter, with Dorothy Parker’s satirical poem on suicide, “Résumé,” also in dimeter:
Táke her up / ténderly, |
Rázors / páin you |
Líft hch / cáre |
Rívers are / dámp; |
Fáshioned so / slénderly |
Ácids / stáin you; |
Yóung and so / fáir. |
And drúgs cause / crámp. |
To describe the versification of a poem, you have to say not only how wide its lines are, but also what rhythm they are written in. English rhythms are based on stressed and unstressed syllables. Each stressed syllable with its associated unstressed syllable(s) makes a single unit, which we call a foot.
There are two main kinds of rhythm in English: rising rhythms and falling rhythms. In a rising rhythm, a foot consists of one or more unstressed syllables leading up to a stressed syllable: ˘´ or ˘˘´.
Where the Yoúth / pined awáy / with desíre,
And the pále / Virgin shroúd / ed in snów
Aríse / from their gráves / and aspíre
Where my Sún / flower wísh / es to gó.
— WILLIAM BLAKE, “Ah Sun-flower”
In a falling rhythm, a foot begins with the stressed syllable, which is followed by one or more unstressed syllables: ´˘ or ´˘˘.
Týger! / Týger! / búrning / bríght
Ín the / fórests / óf the / níght,
— WILLIAM BLAKE, “The Tyger”
Metrical feet are named according to where their stress appears and how many unstressed syllables they possess. Rising rhythms are either iambic (with two syllables, ˘´) or anapestic (with three syllables, ˘˘´). We speak of an iamb or an iambic foot when we mean ˘´; an anapest or an anapestic foot when we mean ˘˘´. Falling rhythms are either trochaic (with two syllables, ´˘) or dactylic (with three syllables, ´˘˘). The corresponding nouns are trochee and dactyl.
When you read a poem in counted lines, try to see whether the general movement is a rising one or a falling one. In the two examples from Blake given above, “Ah Sun-flower” is written in rising anapestic (three-syllable) feet, and “The Tyger” in falling trochaic (two-syllable) feet.
In each line of “Ah Sun-flower,” there are three feet (because there are three stressed syllables):
Where the Yoúth / pined awáy / with desíre
In each line of “The Tyger,” there are four feet (because there are four stressed syllables):
Týger! / týger! / búrning / bríght
If you think of each stressed syllable as a musical beat, the lines of “Ah Sun-flower” have three beats each (“and a one and a two and a three”); the lines of “The Tyger” have four beats each (“one and two and three and four”).
Feet can shed one or more of their unstressed syllables. You can see that at the end of each line in “The Tyger,” an unstressed syllable is “missing.” And in “Ah Sun-flower,” in the line “Aríse / from their gráves / and aspíre,” an unstressed syllable is missing in the first foot, which has only two syllables, “Arise.” These irregularities do not occur so often that they destroy the general impression of the metrical scheme underlying the poem.
If you hear these rhythms in your ear as you read, you will soon recognize them. Here are two more examples, to fill out our scheme:
I found a dimpled spider, fat and white.
— ROBERT FROST, “Design”
Read aloud, this reveals itself to have five beats (five stressed syllables): “and one and two and three and four and five.” Each of the five units consists of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable (iambic foot):
I foúnd / a dímp / led spí / der, fát / and whíte.
Listen to Longfellow’s description of the original American forest:
This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlocks.
— HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW, “Evangeline”
Read aloud, this reveals itself to have six beats (six stressed syllables): “one and a two and a three and // a four and a five and a six and.” Each foot (except the last, which has shed one unstressed syllable) consists of a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables (dactylic foot):
Thís is the / fórest prim / éval // the / múrmuring / pínes and the / hémlocks.
These rising and falling feet occur in lines of different widths. We have seen, above, trimeter lines (“Ah Sun-flower”) and tetrameter lines (“The Tyger”). We have seen pentameter lines (“Design”) and hexameter lines (“Evangeline”). A full description of a line describes its rhythm and then its width. “Ah Sun-flower” is written in anapestic trimeter. “The Tyger” is written in trochaic tetrameter. “Design” is written in iambic pentameter. “Evangeline” is written in dactylic hexameter.
It is less important that you know these names than that you recognize a rhythm by ear. Practice tapping out the rhythms above until they become familiar. Counting out the rhythm and width of a line is called scanning it.
It is often difficult, even impossible, to scan a single line taken by itself. One line can be scanned two or more ways, depending on the intonation we give it. The rule of thumb is to look at the other lines matching it. If they are all five-beat lines, then the dubious line is probably a five-beat line, too. But do not allow the prevailing rhythm, when you read a line aloud, to ride roughshod over the sense; the sense will usually tell you what syllables ought to be stressed.
In all rhythms, some feet are irregular, so that the cadence does not become intolerably inflexible. Feet of comparable length can freely substitute for each other. Shakespeare often begins one of his iambic (˘´) lines with an initial trochaic foot (´˘) to give energy to the line:
Why´ is / my verse / so bar / ren of / new pride?
Each of these metrical schemes is merely a grid underlying a line. The line itself must, by its intonation pattern, indicate the grid (or you cannot know what the basic rhythm is supposed to be), but it can depart from the grid in various ways — by substituting a different foot, by having a light foot called the pyrrhic (˘˘) for unimportant words, or a heavy foot called the spondee (´´) for important words, and so on. What you are asked to do in scanning the line is to see the underlying grid, first of all, and then to note any departures from it. Poets enjoy varying their rhythms to accord with dramatic emphasis, tone of voice, and so on. They also enjoy breaking their lines with a pause in the middle, which we call a caesura and represent with a double slash. An iambic pentameter line can be broken one or more times:
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, // when she walks, // treads on the ground.
And yet, // by heaven, // I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
— SHAKESPEARE, “Sonnet 130”
RHYMES AND STANZA-FORMS
Not all counted poetry is written in rhymes. But because lyric began as song (the name “lyric” comes from “lyre”), simple rhyming stanza-forms such as those found in the ballad or the hymn became important in the English tradition. Gradually, as oral poetry gave way to printed poetry (meant to be read rather than sung), stanza-forms of considerable complexity arose. Here are some of the most common rhyming forms in English. When rhyming units are separated by white space, they are called stanzas. (Stanza, in Italian, means “room.” Poems are made up of little “rooms.”)
While the plowman near at hand,
Whistles o’er the furrowed land,
And the milkmaid singeth blithe,
And the mower whets his scythe,
And every shepherd tells his tale,
Under the hawthorn in the dale.
— JOHN MILTON, “L’Allegro”
These couplets are written in trochaic tetrameter. The rhyme scheme of these lines is indicated thus: aabbcc. That is, because the first two lines rhyme (“hand” “land”), they can be indicated by aa, and because the next two rhyme, they can be indicated by bb. We indicate the rhyme scheme by these abbreviated lowercase italicized letters.
The heroic couplet is an iambic pentameter couplet that is endstopped (marked by a heavy pause after the second line of the couplet), and frequently pointed and witty. Alexander Pope and John Dryden used it with brio:
Meanwhile, declining from the noon of day,
The sun obliquely shoots his burning ray;
The hungry judges soon the sentence sign,
And wretches hang that jurymen may dine.
— ALEXANDER POPE, “The Rape of the Lock”
Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we sit, and for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.
— WALLACE STEVENS,
“Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour”
Terza rima is a form of pentameter tercet with interlinked rhymes (aba bcb cdc and so on) used by Dante in the Divine Comedy. It is difficult to carry off in English, though Shelley used it for his “Ode to the West Wind.” Many poets intend an allusion to Dante when they use loosely rhymed pentameter tercets.
It is an ancient Mariner
And he stoppeth one of three.
—“By thy long gray beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?”
— SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE,
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
Some tetrameter quatrains are rhymed abba, like those in Shakespeare’s “The Phoenix and the Turtle” and Tennyson’s “In Memoriam.” This stanza is generally referred to as the “In Memoriam” stanza:
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.
The heroic quatrain is an iambic pentameter quatrain, rhyming abab:
I know my life’s a pain and but a span;
I know my sense is mock’d with everything;
And, to conclude, I know myself a man,
Which is a proud and yet a wretched thing.
— SIR JOHN DAVIES, “Nosce Teipsum”
Look how a bird lies tangled in a net,
So fast’nd in her arms Adonis lies,
Pure shame and awed resistance made him fret,
Which bred more beauty in his angry eyes.
Rain added to a river that is rank
Perforce will force it overflow the bank.
For love is a celestial harmony
Of likely hearts composed of stars’ consent,
Which join together in sweet sympathy,
To work each other’s joy and true content,
Which they have harbored since their first descent
Out of their heavenly bowers, where they did see
And know each other here beloved to be.
— EDMUND SPENSER, “An Hymn in Honour of Beauty”
Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
— W. B. YEATS, “Among School Children”
St. Agnes’ Eve — Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold:
Numb were the Beadsman’s fingers, while he told
His rosary, and while his frosted breath,
Like pious incense from a censer old,
Seemed taking flight for heaven, without a death,
Past the sweet Virgin’s picture, while his prayer he saith.
— JOHN KEATS, “The Eve of St. Agnes”
There are many unnamed stanza-forms, some of them common ones. For instance, an extra line or two is often added to the ballad stanza, to make a five- or six-line stanza. Or a refrain (a line repeated after every stanza) can be added to lengthen the ballad quatrain.
TYPES OF RHYMING POEMS
The Italian (Petrarchan) sonnet consists of an octave and a sestet. There are embraced rhymes in the octave (the first eight lines): abbaabba. The sestet of a Petrarchan sonnet can rhyme in several different ways, but the most common are cdecde and (as below) cdcdee:
Who will in fairest book of Nature know
How Virtue may best lodged in beauty be,
Let him but learn of Love to read in thee,
Stella, those fair lines which true goodness show.
There shall he find all vices’ overthrow,
Not by rude force, but sweetest sovereignty
Of reason, from whose light those nightbirds fly,
That inward sun in thine eyes shineth so.
And, not content to be Perfection’s heir
Thyself, dost strive all minds that way to move,
Who mark in thee what is in thee most fair.
So while thy beauty draws the heart to love,
As fast thy Virtue bends that love to good.
“But ah,” Desire still cries, “give me some food.”
— SIR PHILIP SIDNEY, Astrophel and Stella, 71
The English (Shakespearean) sonnet consists of three four-line quatrains, alternately rhymed (ababcdcdefef), and a couplet, gg:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever fixèd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come,
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
There have been many variations on the two basic sonnet forms. Spenser wrote sonnets that were composed of linked rhymes: abab bcbc cdcd ee. Some poets (Herbert, Yeats) have made hybrid sonnets by attaching Petrarchan sestets to Shakespearean octaves, or vice versa. Others, like George Meredith and Stevens, have written sonnet-like poems with sixteen or fifteen lines. The odes of Keats basically form their stanzas by combining a Shakespearean quatrain with a Petrarchan sestet (they vary the length of line and sometimes double a rhyme, but it is clear that their elements come from the two sonnet traditions).
September rain falls on the house.
In the failing light, the old grandmother
sits in the kitchen with the child
beside the Little Marvel Stove,
reading the jokes from the almanac,
laughing and talking to hide her tears.
She thinks that her equinoctial tears
and the rain that beats on the roof of the house
were both foretold by the almanac,
but only known to a grandmother.
The iron kettle sings on the stove.
She cuts some bread and says to the child,
It’s time for tea now; but the child
is watching the teakettle’s small hard tears
dance like mad on the hot black stove,
the way the rain must dance on the house.
Tidying up, the old grandmother
hangs up the clever almanac
on its string. Birdlike, the almanac
hovers half open above the child,
hovers above the old grandmother
and her teacup full of dark brown tears.
She shivers and says she thinks the house
feels chilly, and puts more wood in the stove.
It was to be, says the Marvel Stove.
I know what I know, says the almanac.
With crayons the child draws a rigid house
and a winding pathway. Then the child
puts in a man with buttons like tears
and shows it proudly to the grandmother.
But secretly, while the grandmother
busies herself about the stove,
the little moons fall down like tears
from between the pages of the almanac
into the flower bed the child
has carefully placed in the front of the house.
Time to plant tears, says the almanac.
The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove
and the child draws another inscrutable house.
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
There are many other rhymed poem-forms, such as the rondeau, the ballade, the pantoum. A poet using one of the rhymed poem-forms expects the reader to recall the tradition of such forms.
COUNTED VERSE THAT DOES NOT RHYME
The most common form of counted unrhymed verse is blank verse, unrhymed iambic pentameter lines. This is the verse of Shakespeare’s plays and of Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost:
That space the evil one abstracted stood
From his own evil, and for the time remained
Stupidly good, of enmity disarmed,
Of guile, of hate, of envy, of revenge.
Blank verse can also be used in a lyric, as Coleridge uses it in his poem “Frost at Midnight”:
Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch.
Most of the unrhymed verse in English is blank verse, though poets have also written unrhymed four-beat poems that imitate Anglo-Saxon meter. Some poets have experimented with stanzas of unrhymed verse in imitation of Greek and Latin verse (which did not rhyme, but depended on a quantitative system contrasting long vowels with short vowels). Here are two stanzas of Thomas Campion’s “Rose-Cheeked Laura,” an imitation of the Greek meter called, after the poet Sappho, sapphic. The first line has three beats, the next two have four beats each, the fourth line two beats:
Róse-cheeked Laúra, cóme,
Síng thou smoóthly wíth thy beaúty’s
Sílent músic, eíther óther
Sweétly grácing.
Lovely forms do flow
From concent divinely framèd;
Heav’n is music, and thy beauty’s
Birth is heavenly.
Every so often a new poet will once again imitate classical unrhymed forms.
Free verse — verse in which the lines are of different widths, and which does not rhyme in any regular way — was invented by poets who had been brought up on rhymed and counted verse. Poets such as Whitman, Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Williams, Lowell, and Bishop all began by writing conventional verse. Whitman was drawn to free verse because he saw it as a primitive, “bardic” form. Eliot wrote it in imitation of the French poet Jules Laforgue. Pound wrote it in an attempt to achieve poetic effects he thought inhered in the Chinese ideogram. Williams and Stevens adopted it as a way to free themselves from the hold of English poets such as Keats. But behind their free verse there lurked always the shadow of counted verse. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” keeps threatening to turn into regular pentameter. Pound’s largely free-verse “Cantos” include counted and rhymed segments.
The history of free verse is not yet entirely understood. The United States was a more hospitable environment for it than England, and a nativist wish to throw off inherited English forms certainly motivated many American poets. The unit of free verse seems to be the breath: there is a breath limit to the long line of free verse (reached by Whitman and Ginsberg, to give two notable examples). The theoretical appeal of free verse is that it admits an element of chance; it offers a model not of a teleological or providential universe but of an aleatory one, where the casual, rather than the fated, holds sway.
Free verse must justify its reasons for breaking a line here rather than there. If we look at a small free-verse poem, William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow,” we must ask why the lines break where they do:
So much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
We might notice that in each little “stanza,” the second line has only two syllables. This gives symmetry to the poem. The word “upon” literally hangs off the word “depends,” acting out the meaning of something that depends (Latin: dependere, “to hang from”) on something else. The red “wheel” turns into a “wheelbarrow” as we turn the line. Rain turns into rainwater, in the same way. After the inorganic wheelbarrow and rainwater, we may expect an inorganic object to follow the word “white” — say “the white / fences.” Instead, the scene comes alive with chickens.
This very mannered little poem says that if the eye didn’t see something inviting in the landscape (the shiny glaze the rain has put on the redness of the wheelbarrow; the composition of the still wheelbarrow and the living chickens; the contrast of red and white), there would be nothing to write about. “So much depends” on there being something out there to gratify and focus the eye. When we understand the poem, we understand its line-breaks. A free-verse poem that doesn’t justify its line-breaks hardly deserves the name “poem.”
When you come across a new poem, look at the way it displays itself on the page. Is it a skinny poem or a wide poem? A short poem or a long one? Are all the lines the same width, or are some shorter than others? Does it rhyme? Does it have stanzas?
Think of the look of the poem as its body. Is it a symmetrical body or a ragged body? A solid-looking body or an emaciated one?
As you read it aloud and listen to its rhythms, feel what it is telling you. Is it serious or even ponderous? Or does it move with a lilt and a skip? Does it change its manner of walking, from indolent to hurried? Does it manifest leisure or anxiety in its rhythms?
These are questions to ask even before you begin to note a rhyme scheme or count how many beats there are in a line. After you have done the technical noticing and counting, ask yourself how these formal features match up with the sentiments and emotions that the poem is expressing. Do the formal features align with those sentiments, or do they contradict them? It is always worthwhile to pay attention to the technical work the poet has done on the external form of the poem; it is, after all, the body the poet has chosen to live in for a determined period.
For a more complete survey of metrical forms, see Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form (New York: Random House, 1965; revised 1979); or John Hollander, Rhyme’s Reason (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981). For fuller definitions of terms used here, see the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger et al. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965; rpt. 1993).
A familiarity with grammatical terms can help you to analyze and to describe poetry. This appendix provides a brief review of some of the most common and useful grammatical terms.
A word that names a person, place, thing, or idea. Examples: “Adam,” “garden,” “chair,” “destiny.” In short, a noun names an essence.
A word that tells you something about that essence. An adjective modifies a noun by limiting or describing it. Examples: “the early bird,” “a false alarm.” An adjective expresses something present with or connected to a noun, but not essential: “a red wheelbarrow” (not all wheelbarrows are red). Adjectives are the chief resource of descriptive language, as when Shakespeare says (“Sonnet 129”) that lust is “perjur’d, murderous, bloody, full of blame, / Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust.” The plainness of nouns is fleshed out by adjectives; and the complexity of life is such that poems need a wealth of adjectives to describe their essential nouns.
A word that stands in for a noun. Pronouns can be used as subjects (nominative case, as in “On a cloud I saw a child”) or as objects (objective case, as in “And he laughing said to me”). In what follows I’ll give the objective case in brackets after the nominative case.
The first-person singular is “I” [objective: “me”]; the first-person plural is “we” [“us”].
The modern second-person pronoun is “you” in both the singular and plural, nominative and objective, though in the past it was more complex. Then, the second-person singular was “thou” [“thee”], and the plural was “ye.” “Thou” was used both in familiar address and in an exalted form of address to God or a monarch; over time, “you” took its place.
The third-person singular pronouns are “he” [“him”], “she” [“her”], and “it”; the plural is “they” [“them”].
A change in person (“I” to “you”) or in number (“I” to “we”) in a poem is always of profound significance, since, on the general principle of inertia, a speaker tends to continue in the same person rather than change, unless the change is somehow provoked. In the poem “In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz,” Yeats himself changes significantly from “I” to “we,” as he finally makes common cause with the sisters he had begun by opposing; and his reference to the sisters changes from “one or the other” (third-person, people other than the poet) to “you” (people he addresses) to “we” (part of a group that also includes the poet):
Many a time I think to seek
One or the other out. . . .
Dear shadows, now you know it all. . . .
We the great gazebo built. . . .
A reader who misses the changes in person and number here misses the essential drama of the poem, as the poet changes his mind about the sisters and his relation to them.
A word that usually conveys either action (“My mother bore me in the southern wild”) or state (“And I am black”). Verbs may be
Linking verbs, which join two things that are equivalent (“He seems tired”; “I will become a teacher”; “Mary is a doctor”);
Transitive verbs, which take objects both direct and indirect (“I gave him the book”); or
Intransitive verbs, which do not take an object (“The building fell down”).
Verbs can appear in two voices:
Active: “I do this.”
Passive: “This is done to me.”
They can take on different tenses (past, present, future, and so on):
Simple present: “I sing of heaven.”
Present of habitual action: “Whenever it rains, I take my umbrella.”
Present of perpetual truth: “Water boils at 212°F.”
Present of state: “I am a lawyer.”
Present progressive: “It is raining.”
Simple past: “I knew him, Horatio.”
Compound past: “I have known him a long time.”
Past progressive: “It was snowing.”
Pluperfect: “I had known him for several years before I met his wife.”
Simple future: “I will call him tomorrow.”
Future perfect: “I will have called him by Wednesday.”
Future progressive: “I shall be telling this with a sigh.”
They can appear in different moods (statement, question, wish, and so on):
Indicative (states an assertion): “I like him.”
Interrogative (asks a question): “Do you like him?”
Imperative (gives a command): “Do this.”
Subjunctive (often contrary to fact or hypothetical): “If I were to do this, I would be prosecuted.”
Optative (wish): “Oh, if I could only do [have done] this!”
Hortatory (enjoining something): “Let us kiss and part.”
Conditional: “I should like to come if you would let me.”
Poems can achieve multiple effects by changing tenses and moods as they go along.
A word that characterizes (limits or describes) a verb, just as an adjective characterizes a noun. Adverbs answer the questions “Where?” “How?” “In what manner?” “When?” “Why?” and so on. Examples: “Till noon we quietly sailed on”; “my collar mounting firmly to my chin.” Since verbs, like nouns, tend to be bare things, the poet uses adverbs to put a halo of circumstance around the verbs of the poem. Verbs are also amplified by adverbial phrases: “From you have I been absent in the spring.”
There are numberless speech acts in which a lyric speaker may engage. The list that follows is merely a sampling of common ones in lyric. It is always a good idea to name the successive speech acts in a poem. Does it begin with an apology? Is that followed by a plea? Is that followed by a claim? Is that followed by a boast? This classifying helps you to track the emotions that structure a poem.
ACKNOWLEDGING |
The darkness drops again, but now I know. . . . |
ADDRESS |
Old trooper, I see your child’s red crayon pass. |
ADMISSION |
Alas, ’tis true, I have gone here and there, And made myself a motley to the view. |
APOLOGY |
Sweet Love of youth, forgive, if I forget thee. |
APOSTROPHE |
O wild West Wind! |
BANISHING |
Hence, loathèd Melancholy! |
BOAST |
Not marble, nor the gilded monuments Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme. |
CELEBRATION |
I celebrate myself, and sing myself. |
CLAIM |
Mine — by the Right of the White Election! |
COMMAND |
Irish poets, learn your trade, Sing whatever is well made. |
CONJECTURE |
Thou mayst be false, and yet I know it not. |
CONSOLATION |
Fear no more the heat o’ the sun. |
DEFINITION |
Remorse – is Memory – awake – |
DESCRIPTION |
No cloud, no relique of the sunken day Distinguishes the West. |
DIALOGUE |
Does the road wind uphill all the way? Yes, to the very end. |
DREAMING |
I dream of a Ledaean body, bent Above a sinking fire. |
EXCLAMATION |
What a piece of work is a man! |
EXHORTATION |
Be shellèd, eyes, with double dark And find the uncreated light. |
EXPOSTULATION |
Up, up, my friend, and quit your books! |
GENERALIZATION |
All this the world well knows, yet none knows well To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell. |
IMPRECATION |
For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love. |
INSTRUCTION |
He who binds to himself a joy Does the wingèd life destroy. |
INVITATION |
Come live with me and be my love. |
INVOCATION |
But come, thou goddess fair and free. |
LAMENT |
Alas! I have nor hope nor health. |
NARRATION |
|
PRESENT |
It is an ancient Mariner And he stoppeth one of three. |
PAST |
I wandered lonely as a cloud. |
HABITUAL |
For oft, when on my couch I lie . . . They flash upon that inward eye. |
HISTORICAL |
Calvert and Wilson, Blake and Claude, Prepared a peace for the people of God. |
OATH |
I will not harm her, by all saints I swear. |
PLEA |
Say, may I be for aye thy vassal blest? |
PRAYER |
Mine, O thou Lord of life, send my roots rain. |
PROPHECY |
Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee. |
QUESTION |
Did he who made the Lamb make thee? |
REBUTTAL |
Love’s not Time’s fool. |
REMINISCENCE |
I was thy neighbor once, thou rugged Pile! |
REQUEST |
Permit me voyage, love, into your hands. |
RESOLVE |
Despair I will not. |
RETRACTION |
But I am by her death (which word wrongs her) . . . |
RHETORICAL QUESTION |
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? |
SCORNING |
How vainly men themselves amaze To win the palm, the oak, the bays. |
SELF-BLAME |
I see |
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be |
|
As I am mine, their sweating selves, but worse. |
|
SELF-CORRECTION |
Alas, but Morrison fell young: He never fell, thou fall’st, my tongue. He stood, a soldier to the last right end. |
SELF-PRESENTATION |
I am the mower Damon. |
SPELL |
No exorciser harm thee! Nor no witchcraft charm thee! |
SUPPOSITION |
Had we but world enough, and time. |
SURMISE |
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet . . . |
But, in embalmèd darkness, guess each sweet. |
|
VOW |
Yes, I will be thy priest. |
These devices, sometimes called “figures of speech,” appear in all speech and writing (you can find them in advertising, political speeches, and newspapers, as well as in essays, letters, and poems). It helps, if you wish to give a brief description of what a writer is doing at a given moment, to know some of these shorthand terms for frequent practices.
ALTERNATIVE ORDERING |
A man that looks on glass, On it may stay his eye, Or, if he pleaseth, through it pass, And then the heaven espy. |
ANALOGY (comparison of A and B) |
No more be grieved at that which thou hast done: Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud. |
ANAPHORA (repetition of opening word) |
All shuffle there, all cough in ink, All wear the carpet with their shoes, All think what other people think; All know the man their neighbor knows. |
ANTICLIMAX |
In silk, in crepes, in Garters, and in rags. |
ANTITHESIS (opposition of A and B) |
For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright, Who art as black as hell, as dark as night. |
APPOSITION (list of different formulations of the same thing) |
The Mind of Man, My haunt, and the main region of my song. |
CATALOGUE |
The leaden-eyed shark, the walrus, the turtle, the hairy sea-leopard. |
CHIASMUS (an X-like arrangement) |
By brooks too broad for leaping The lightfoot boys are laid; The rose-lipt girls are sleeping In fields where roses fade. [brooks : boys :: girls : fields] |
HIERARCHICAL ORDERING |
Such sweet neglect more taketh me Than all th’ adulteries of art. |
METAPHOR (comparison without “like” or “as”) |
Church bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood, The land of spices; something understood. |
METONYMY (assemblage by parts) |
Four beating wings, two beaks, a swirling mass. |
ONOMATOPOEIA (imitative sound) |
And murmuring of innumerable bees. |
PARADOX (union of dissimilar qualities) |
There is in God, some say, A deep but dazzling darkness. |
PARALLELISM |
These are thy wonders, Lord of Power . . . These are thy wonders, Lord of Love. |
PERIPHRASIS (circumlocution) |
The Peer now spreads the glittering forfex wide [= opens scissors] |
PERSONIFICATION (an abstraction made into a person) |
Love is swift of foot, Love’s a man of war. |
PUN (a play on two meanings of one word) |
Therefore I lie with her, and she with me, And in our faults by lies we flattered be. |
QUOTATION |
My flesh began unto my soul in pain, “Sicknesses cleave my bones.” |
SIMILE (comparison with “like” or “as”) |
Like as the waves make toward the pebbled shore, So do our minutes hasten to their end. |
SYNECDOCHE (use of the part for the whole) |
Diadems – drop – and Doges – surrender |
ZEUGMA (two dissimilar objects of same verb) |
Or stain her honor,or her new brocade. |
This is a summary of the kinds of poems that lyric poets return to most frequently. It is convenient to be able to name a poem by its kind, because you can then compare it to others of the same kind.
ADDRESS TO THE READER |
Pray thee, take care, that tak’st my book. |
BALLAD |
There lived a wife at Usher’s well, And a wealthy wife was she; She had three stout and stalwart sons, And sent them o’er the sea. |
CHILD’S POEM |
“The Little Black Boy” (Blake) |
DAWN POEM (aubade) |
Get up! get up for shame! the blooming morn Upon her wings presents the god unshorn. |
DEATHBED POEM |
I heard a Fly buzz – when I died – |
DEBATE-POEM |
Body O who shall me deliver whole From bonds of this tyrannic soul? . . . Soul What magic could me thus confine Within another’s grief to pine? |
ECHO-POEM |
Then tell me, what is that supreme delight? Light. Light to the mind, what shall the will enjoy? Joy. |
EKPHRASIS (poem on an art object) |
“Ode on a Grecian Urn” (Keats) |
ELEGY |
Felix Randal the farrier, O is he dead then, my duty all ended? |
EMBLEM-POEM (allegorical object) |
“The Sick Rose” (Blake) |
EPIGRAM (short, pointed poem) |
I am his Highness’ dog at Kew: And pray, good sir, whose dog are you? |
EPITAPH |
Underneath this stone doth lie All of beauty that could die. |
EPITHALAMION (wedding song) |
And evermore they Hymen Hymen sing, That al the woods them answer and theyr eccho ring. |
HYMN |
Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Lift up your gates and sing, Hosanna in the highest . . . |
INSCRIPTION |
I the poet William Yeats . . . Restored this tower for my wife George: And may these characters remain When all is ruin once again. |
LETTER |
This is my letter to the World That never wrote to me. |
LOVER’S COMPLAINT |
And wilt thou leave me thus? |
LULLABY |
Lullay, lullay, thou tiny child. |
MUSE-POEM |
“The Solitary Reaper” (Wordsworth) |
NOCTURNE |
’Tis the year’s midnight, and it is the day’s. |
PASTORAL (rustic poem) |
The shepherds’ swains shall dance and sing For thy delight each May morning. |
POLITICAL POEM |
“Easter, 1916” (Yeats) |
PRAISE-POEM |
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate. |
QUEST-POEM |
“Childe Roland” (Browning) |
RELIGIOUS POEM |
I saw eternity the other night. |
ROMANCE (fairy-tale poem) |
“The Eve of St. Agnes” (Keats) |
SEASONAL POEM |
Sumer is icumen in, Lhude sing cuccu! |
SELF-REFLEXIVE POEM |
I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers. |
SHAPED POEM |
“Easter Wings” (Herbert) |
SONG |
It was a lover and his lass, With a hey and a ho and a hey nonny no . . . |
TWIN POEMS |
“The Lamb” and “The Tyger” (Blake) |
VALEDICTION |
Adieu, farewell earth’s bliss. |
VARIATIONS ON A THEME |
“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” (Stevens) |
There are many others such that one could name: the bird poem, the eclogue (a dialogue of shepherds), the georgic (a poem on farming), the testament (a poem making a will), the conversation poem (a poem of a middle, or familiar, style recounting a conversation among friends), and so on. The essential thing is to realize that almost any poem is a repeat of a preceding genre, perhaps an answer to it, perhaps a revision of it. Thinking “What kind of a lyric is this?” makes you more aware of its place in a genre tradition, and of its response to that tradition.