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Doggerel: Tools in the Toolbox
Colonel Brown, in formulating the Group Writing topic for this month, suggested various spurs for approaching the topic, including: “Tell us about your favorite or least favorite form of verse.” Poetic verse forms are tools. Every tool has its strengths and weaknesses. For instance, one can pound on things with a wrench, but it is better for turning nuts or bolts. One can also loosen a nut with a hammer, after a fashion, but the hammer is better as a tool to pound on things, such as nails. Poetic forms each have their uses, their strengths, and their weaknesses.
A haiku might be good for conveying an image, especially laden with a double or triple entendre or strong contrast. But it isn’t usually that good for conveying a long story. Sonnets are also great for contrasts, since a proper sonnet has a pivot or turn of thought. But being longer, it might have several images or even convey much more movement of thought and detail than a haiku could. As we look at the verse forms as tools, it is certainly possible for someone to say, “I like this one best.” But the question always lingers, “Best for what purpose?”
Petals fall
Cherry blossoms done
New seasons.¹
I walked along the old, long path
Where cherry trees all bloom
They suffered from the summer wrath
of stormy winds and gloom.
The petals shot from blooms in wind
Their useful lives complete.
They littered down from start to end,
Were trampled by my feet.
The once-pink petals smudged and torn,
The once-whole flowers burst,
The spring is old and faded, worn,
And summer brings his worst.
Spring and Summer in the Cherry Grove
The cherry tree abloom, beauty of spring.
A cheerful sight to behold after gloom
As winter fades to rosy dawns and brings
The greens and pinks replacing snow and doom.
The flowers flow in gentle, warm, fine winds
Back and forth with branches born by breezes
In hushed, gentle undulations that trend
To strengthen as the spring wanes and wheezes.
And then their time is done. The petals drop.
Blooms disappear as quickly as they came.
The joy, the heartening sight, is all but stopped
As if the summer were the cherry’s shame.
But then Spring’s promise is fulfilled anew
With hanging fruit to drive away the blues.
There we have three poems on a similar topic, cherry petals falling at the end of their season, but they have very different feels and effects. The haiku presents a very abbreviated image and thought, The reader has much that he must infer from the poem. The three stanzas in hymnal stanza paint the picture much more graphically. The English sonnet is a bit longer and allows for the presentation of more of time’s passing. And unlike most sonnets, it has not one, but two pivots.
Many think that forms with a lot of repetition can bring a comic element to the poetry. Some examples are the Triolet and the Villanelle.
Of course, if all you have is a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail. If you need to learn more about poetic forms, I have an incomplete resource easily available. Maybe some day I shall finish it up.
In the meantime, what is your favorite poetic form? Would you like to provide examples?
(The limericks start in 3…2…1)
- While the general way of translating a haiku into the English language is using 5-7-5 syllable lines, many poets trying to recreate the sparseness of the form in Japanese use more compact forms such as 3-5-3 or even 2-3-2.
My parents would murder me if I did a PhD in minority poetry of the Ottoman Empire. I have to be at least marginally employable.
Something something something Russian oligarch or maybe Turkish oligarch pining for the fjords of empire?
“Mom, Dad, I’d like you to meet Sergei. He’s 87 years young, and coincidentally worth about 87 million Rubles. And you said that Russian Language double major wouldn’t amount to anything.”
Turkish fjords. I see a problem developing already. Maybe the bitter dry roast of empire? Just remember not to mention Greece. Or Cyprus. Or…maybe fjords is better than I’ve given it credit for.
If Erdogan is suddenly in possession of fjords, something has gone radically wrong.
If one goes back far enough, the people we know as the Vikings were hanging out in Anatolia as Imperial guards and tradesmen.
His stand up is hit or miss with me, but I think he’s brillant on 8 out of Ten Cats Does Countdown. Jimmy, David Mitchell, Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry, Ben Miller, the list goes on; Cambridge really does nurture great comedians.
Big. Nasty. Carry axes.
And the Guard could be trouble too.
What’s the dividing line between devices that rely on the word’s sound vs meaning? I notice Allusion and Anachronism alongside Alliteration. I’m not sure, for instance, on which side Enjambment would fall.
Who says that is the dividing line or that all devices have to be related to a word? Enjambment covers whether there is some form of end-stopping for the line or not, letting one line flow into the next. Alliteration cannot be about the sound of one word. There have to be at least two words involved. Anaphora is structural repetition. Synecdoche is a substitution of a smaller thing to represent a larger thing. There are literally hundreds, maybe thousands, of poetic devices.
Classical scholars had four categories they divided figures of speech into: addition, omission, permutation, and transposition. But I am not sure that this schema really holds all the things we do within poetry and writing.
I took a college course devoted to writing poetry. Like all my classes, I gave it a fraction of the effort and attention it deserved.
But I will always remember the teacher responding to my quote of Robert Frost about “playing tennis with the net down” by inviting my to consider a balance between “the tyranny of rhyme” and the utility of rhyme.
Generally, I agree. Forms should be guidelines — sometimes strictly obeyed, sometimes loosely regarded, but never forgotten entirely. To ignore rhyme and meter completely isn’t “free verse”; it’s just prose.
Poetic isn’t the same as poetry, like a feminine man is yet a man.
Agreed, Aaron. There is a lot more to poetry and prosody than what most people in the English world are generally aware of. Native English (Anglo-Saxon) poetry didn’t use rhyme originally. It was based on accentual meter and alliteration. There are many other countries/cultures/languages where rhyme is not used and the meter is based on something other than our modern accentual-syllabic sensibility. There are very long and fancy definitions of what poetry is, but I usually boil it down to:
That doesn’t exclude much by nature. I’m still not sure about this work, for instance, since I am not sure that the line breaks mean anything, but I have a much, much broader definition of poetry than I used to.
I studied Geoffrey Chaucer for four semesters, and produced 60+ pages at one point on the prosody of Troilus and Criseyde (in part because the matter of Troilus and Criseyde is to drag the courtly romances of his period along with his protagonist through a sewer by a privy. It is the one work of his that I have no patience or sympathy for. It is Homer meets Petrarch and, I am here to report, whining armored pansies do not work for me. So I dwelled on the prosody, especially the way the prosody shifted when, for example, he references Ovid and drops into a Greek meter or references the Aeneid and mimics the Aeneid‘s diction and prosody. He was pretty agile and diverse for a stuffy old white guy.
Chaucer was the first great poet of the English language to tackle the world. Soldier, diplomat, companion to princes, his father’s connections as a butler when butler meant the fellow who handled the wine, purchasing to storing to pouring. The king’s butler.
Chaucer traveled widely, first as a soldier and then as a diplomat, mingled with the French and Italian poets of his day, he studied prosody to a tee as he went, and he is constantly playing in the prosody as well as the semantic, and dragging romance language vocabulary into English for fresh ideas and to fit the rhyme and meter. The breadth of his poetry makes Shakespeare seem narrow, drama, comedy, farce, romance, the sacred, the profane, court life, ecclesiastical life, fart jokes, and more. And he provides a rich diversity of prosody, sometimes borrowed usually from romance languages, often adjusted to reflect the germanic legacy of the English language. The Oxford English Dictionary is an evidence book of English’s vigorous looting of world languages, and Chaucer is the prime defendant.
For a sample, Chaucer the poet writes to Adam the scribe, capturing the eternal relationship between writers and publishers:
A nice, rolling hexametric take on rhyme royale.
If we insist on significant line breaks how much Milton are we left with? For long form blank verse, the line breaks sometimes suddenly become significant for emphasis while otherwise just providing the eye a beat. Just as the occasional rhyme or alliteration draws attention. What you don’t use gets noticed when you do use it.
Chaucer was indeed a master of prosody. He also helped to start the Great English Poetic Debate that has raged ever since.
If it is blank verse, then it is syllabic or accentual syllabic metered verse. If the lines are iambic pentameter, for instance, the line is important. They just aren’t rhymed or necessarily in equal stanzas/strophes/sections.
I have the tee-shirt of this.
It says it quite well, doesn’t it?
I was going to respond to this. Then I read all the comments. Now me wee head hurts.
We’ve got some complexities in Khmer poetry. And these eight metres aren’t even the most complicated ones.
Let me ‘splain. Language is a mapping between concepts and symbols. A device that relies on properties of the symbol, like rhyme, syllable count, regular emphasis, alliteration, and so forth is a fundamentally different thing than one that relies on properties of the concept, like anachronism or allusion.
You listed devices of both kinds together. It seems that the distinction between conceptual and symbolic poetic devices should be the most important, since it lies closest to the essence of language.
That is more clear, yes. Sort of the old concrete vs. abstract.
Well aren’t you revealing new sides to yourself!
This is a very, very old side of myself. But thank you.
Not shown on Ricochet often, though.
And thank you! Or should I say thanks a lot for makin’ me feel like I have to use big words around you from now on
Stop by today and sign up to share a bit of verse you like or dislike as part of our July Group Writing theme: “The Doggerel Days of Summer.”
Interested in Group Writing topics that came before? See the handy compendium of monthly themes. Check out links in the Group Writing Group. You can also join the group to get a notification when a new monthly theme is posted.
English doesn’t borrow