Poetic Elements

Poetry is thoughts that breath and words that burn Thomas Gray

Poetry is about interpretation

It is not meant to be taken literally
 Imagery
Imagery: the senses the poem
evokes in the reader, puts the
reader in the poem, and helps
reader to see the poem.
The tools of imagery are
Senses : sound, sight, touch,
smell, taste, and emotion.
Figurative language : metaphor,
simile, personification,
hyperbole, etc.
 Those Winter Sundays
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

Id wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

When the rooms were warm, hed call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,

who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of loves austere and lonely offices?
Robert Hayden
 Figurative Language
Figurative language is words not meant to be
taken literally. The words are symbolic. We know
these images as metaphor, simile, personification,
hyperbole, and others.
What are some reasons why a poet would use
figurative language.
Look at example from an Arthurian Legend. What
do they mean??
a cold knife of loneliness pressed against his heart
their bodies locked together as though a trap had
sprung
 Personification
When an author uses personification, he gives
human characteristics to a non-human object.

Look at the human characteristics used by Howard

Nemerov in his poem The Vacuum. Also notice
how personification reveals the speakers attitude
toward housekeeping.
 The Vacuum
The house is quiet now
The vacuum cleaner sulks in the corner closet,
Its bag limp as a stopped lung, its mouth
Grinning into the floor, maybe at my
Slovenly life, my dog-dead youth.

Ive lived this way long enough,

But when my old woman died her soul
Went into that vacuum cleaner, and I cant bear
To see the bag swell like a belly, eating the dust
And the woolen mice, and begin to howl

Because there is old filth everywhere

She used to crawl, in corner and under the stair.
I know now how life is cheap as dirt,
And still the hungry, angry heart
Hangs on and howls, biting at air.
 Hyperbole/ Exaggeration
The poet uses hyperbole to overstate something
to reveal the truth.
In a poem called Sow Sylvia Plath describes
how much the sow eats. She writes, Of
kitchen slops and, stomaching no constraint,/
Proceeded to swill/ The seven seas and every
earthquaking continent.
How much did the sow eat?
 Music
The poet uses musical devices to make the
poem song-like. In fact, some poems
are/were songs.
The musical devices we will discuss, and be
responsible for, are onomatopoeia, rhythm,
rhyme, alliteration , assonance, consonance,
repetition, and enjambment.
 Onomatopoeia
We are familiar with onomatopoeia even
if we dont understand the word.
When two cars collide, what sound do
they make? Crash! That is
onomatopoeia words that make the
sound they are imitating.

Here is a poem by Eve Merriam

appropriately titled Onomatopoeia.
See how many sounds are heard.
Onomatopoeia
The rusty spigot
sputter,
utters
a sputter,
spatters a smattering of drops,
gashes wider;
slash,
splatters,
scatters,
spurts,
finally stops sputtering
and plash!
gushes rushes splashes
clear water dashes.
 Rhythm
Rhythm is the beat of a poem. It is the pattern of
stressed and unstressed syllables. There are
several rhythm patterns in poetry which we will
not go into in this presentation which will be
shown later.

Lets look at the following poem and see if we can

identify the pattern of stressed and unstressed
beats.
 Counting-Out Rhyme

Silver bark of beech , and sallow

Bark of yellow birch and yellow
Twig of willow.

Stripe of green in moosewood maple,

Colour seen in leaf of apples,
Bark of popple.

Wood of popple pale as moonbeam,

Wood of oak for yoke and bran-beam,
Wood of hornbeam.

Silver bark of beech, and hollow

Stem of elder, tall and yellow
Twig of willow.
Exact rhyme are words that have the exact
same-sounding ending, like cat and hat
Slant rhyme words sound similar, but arent
exact, like one and down.
A rhyme scheme is the pattern of rhyming
words.
Look at the following poem and identify the
rhyme scheme.
Jean Toomer
 Letters
Repetitive initial consonant sounds in a poem are
called alliteration.
Repetition of other consonant sounds is called
consonance.
Repetitive vowel sounds are called assonance.
The following poem has many examples of each.
See how many you can find. Also notice what
other element of poetry you can find.
Fueled by Marcie Hans
Fueled
by a million
man-made
wings of fire
the rocket tore a tunnel
through the sky
and everybody cheered,
Fueled
only by a thought from God
the seedling
urged its way
through the thickness of black
and as it pierced
the ceiling of the soil
and launched itself
up into outer space
no
one
even
clapped.
 Poems also create music through the
repetition of words and lines.

Look at the poem One Perfect Rose by

Dorothy Parker. One line is repeated three
times. Notice how the meaning of the line
changes by the third repetition.
A single flowr he sent me, since we met.
All tenderly his messenger he chose;
Deep-hearted, pure with scented dew still wet
One perfect rose.

I knew the language of the flowerlet;

My fragile leaves, it said, his heart enclose.
Love long has taken for his amulet
One perfect rose.

Why is it no one ever sent me yet

One perfect limousine, do you suppose?
Ah no, its always just my luck to get
One perfect rose.
 Enjambment-Punctuation within the lines

Meaning flows as the lines progress, and the readers eye

is forced to go on to the next sentence. It can also make
the reader feel uncomfortable or the poem feel like flow-
of-thought with a sensation of urgency or disorder.

We Real Cool by Gwendolyn Brooks

We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June.
We die soon.
Notice that the enjambment forces you to
pause before the end of the line. The word we
is emphasized and gives the poem a
syncopated rhythm, similar to the rhythm in
jazz. This is appropriate since the poem is
about the period of the 30s when Prohibition
was in effect and jazz was king.
 Form
Form is the structure of the poem. Any type
of writing must have something to hold it
together.

The structure can be created through many

means: meter, stanza, rhyme scheme, or set
patterns of poetry like sonnet, haiku ,
concrete, and others.
 Meter
Meter is the set pattern of stressed and
unstressed syllables in a line of poetry. The
main meter patterns are
Iambic -- U/ (one foot)
Trochee - /U
Anapest -- UU/
Dactyl -- //U
 Iambic
Iambic is the most common pattern of meter since it is the way we
generally talk . It is the unstressed/stressed syllable pattern.
Here is an example of iambic lines:
Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright, (U/|U/|U/|U/)
The bridal of the earth and sky; (U/|U/|U/|U/)
The dew shall weep thy fall to night, (U/|U/|U/|U/)
For thou must die.(U/|U/|) (from Virtue by George Herbert)
 Trochee
Trochee is the reverse of an iamb. It is a stressed/unstressed
pattern like in this line:
Piping down the valleys wild, (/U|/U|/U|/)
Piping songs of pleasant glee, (/U|/U|/U|/)
On a cloud I saw a child, (/U|/U|/U|/)
From Songs of Innocence by William Blake
 Stanza
A stanza in poetry is like a paragraph in
prose. The author divides the poem by
grouping words into stanzas. We can often
see the structure of the poem by the authors
use of stanza.
 Rhyme Scheme
Having a certain rhyme scheme also is a
way to give structure to poetry.
Look at the rhyme scheme in the poem
Cross by Langston Hughes. See how it
holds the poem together. Also notice the
use of stanzas. Why did Hughes put these
words in the stanza?
 Cross
Langston Hughes
My old mans a white old man
And my old mothers black.
If ever I cursed my white old man
I take my curses back.

If ever I cursed my black old mother

And wished she were in hell,
Im sorry for that evil wish
And now I wish her well.

My old man died in a fine big house.

My ma died in a shack.
I wonder where Im gonna die
Being neither white or black?