Module 2: Poetry

Creative Nonfiction – 12
 Stanza

• Group of lines in a poem.

• Comes from the Italian word for a room or a stopping
place.
• The lines in a poem are called verse.
• The term verse comes from the Latin word versus which
means the same thing as a furrow.
 Versification

• The practice of breaking down a group of text into lines.

• Czeslaw Milosz – “Prose is made to be written, a poem is
made to be read”
• Poem must have a pattern of musicality or rhythm,
regardless if it ha rhyme or meter or is written in free verse.
 Rhythmic patterns in poetry
1. Lyrical Poem – follows a metrical pattern derived from the lyre, the
musical instrument used for reciting and singing poems in ancient times.
E.. John Donne’s “Song: Go and Catch a Falling Star”
2. Breathing Pattern – Cirilo Bautista noted that “the originators of free
verse believed that the language of the poem should be as close as
possible to common speech—in rhythm diction and tempo.”
“the matter of how long or short a line should depend on the natural system
of breathing.”
Breathing pattern in poetry follows the beating of the heart. It sets the
tone of the poem.
Song: Go and catch a falling star
BY JOHN DONNE
Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the devil's foot,
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy's stinging,
And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.
 If thou be'st born to strange sights,
Things invisible to see,
Ride ten thousand days and nights,
Till age snow white hairs on thee,
Thou, when thou return'st, wilt tell me,
All strange wonders that befell thee,
And swear,
No where
Lives a woman true, and fair.
 If thou find'st one, let me know,
Such a pilgrimage were sweet;
Yet do not, I would not go,
Though at next door we might meet;
Though she were true, when you met her,
And last, till you write your letter,
Yet she
Will be
False, ere I come, to two, or three.
 Basic Elements of Poetry
1. Rhythm - can be described as the beat and pace of a
poem. The rhythmic beat is created by the pattern of
stressed. and unstressed. syllables in a line or verse. In
modern poetry, line breaks, repetition and even spaces
for silence can help to create rhythm.
2. Persona - the speaker of the poem. Does not have to
be the main character or one of the characters. Your
poem can mention who or what the persona is.
 The Fly by William Blake
Little fly,
Thy summer’s play If thought is life
My thoughtless hand And strength and
Has brushed away. breath,
And the want
Am not I
A fly like thee?
Of thought is death,
Or art not thou Then am I
A man like me? A happy fly,
For I dance If I live,
And drink and sing, Or if I die
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing.
 Forms of Poetry
1. Epic poem – a long poem which narrates the journey of a hero or
nation. E.g. “Iliad and Odyssey”
2. Sonnet – has 14 line with 10 syllables each line and a rhyme
scheme. A rhyme scheme is the structure of a rhyming pattern.
• Shakespearean Sonnet – abab/cdcd/efef/gg
• Petrarchan Sonnet – abba/abba/cde/cde/ or abba abba cdc dcd
• Spenserian Sonnet – abab bcbc cdcd ee
3. Ballad - a poem with a musical quality. It is sometimes set to
music. A ballad is narrative in nature; this means that it tells a
story. Most ballads are written in an ABAB rhyme scheme which
means that lines one and three rhyme, and lines two and four
rhyme.
4. Limerick - a short, five-line poem with just one stanza.
Limericks have an AABBA rhyme scheme and a bouncy rhythm.
The subject matter of a limerick is often whimsical and funny
5. Sestina - The sestina is a complex, thirty-nine-
line poem featuring the intricate repetition of end-words in six
stanzas and an envoi
6. Pantoum - consists of a series of quatrains rhyming abab
in which the second and fourth lines of a quatrain recur as
the first and third lines in the succeeding quatrain; each
quatrain introduces a new second rhyme (as bcbc, cdcd).
7. Haiku - consists of three lines, with five syllables in the
first line, seven in the second, and five in the third.
8. Villanelle - a poem of nineteen lines, and which follows a
strict form that consists of five tercets (three-line stanzas)
followed by one quatrain (four-line stanza).
9. Tanaga – have four lines with seven syllables each and
has aaaa rhyme scheme.
 Free Verse
• It is not entirely free because it also needs to observe a body of
rules that dictates its shape and sound.
• It originated from Paris where the poetic form Alejandrine a
rhyme-and-meter poem with 12 syllables each line was
practiced.
• Caesura – how you cut each line equally.
• Enjambment – you cut the line for effect.
• A caesura is a pause that occurs within a line of poetry,
usually marked by some form of punctuation such as a
period, comma, ellipsis, or dash. A caesura doesn't have to
be placed in the exact middle of a line of poetry. It can be
placed anywhere after the first word and before the last
word of a line. In the following line from the prologue of
Romeo and Juliet, the comma after "Verona" marks a
caesura: "In fair Verona, where we lay our scene."
Enjambment occurs when a line is cut off before
its natural stopping point. It is a
transition/continuation between lines. E.g. "I went
out and / lost my way," where the "/" is a line
break. This literary device encourages a reader
down to the next following line of a poem, and
then the next, quickly.
 Prose Poetry
a type of writing that combines lyrical and metric
elements of traditional poetry with idiomatic elements
of prose, such as standard punctuation and the lack of
line breaks. Upon first glance, a prose poem may
appear to be a wholly unremarkable paragraph of
standard prose, but a reader who chooses to dig in will
note poetic overtones within its meter, repetition, and
choice of language.
• Concrete Poem – a text of a poem
about a tree can look like a tree.
• Erasure Poem – you can erase texts
• Collage – collect pictures and texts.
• Visual poem – digital image