Rhyme

Beginners attempting the technical aspects of poetry will probably notice the rhyme scheme first, because it is the most obvious characteristic of a poem. Rhyme is the repetition of the stressed vowel sound and all succeeding sounds.

Rhyme partly seems to be enjoyed simply as a repeating pattern that is pleasant to hear. It also serves as a powerful mnemonic device, facilitating memorization. The regular use of tail rhyme helps to mark off the ends of lines, thus clarifying the metrical structure for the listener. As with other poetic techniques, poets use it to suit their own purposes; for example William Shakespeare often used a rhyming couplet to mark off the end of a scene in a play.

Function of Rhyme：

A rhyme serves two distinct functions in the art of writing poetry:

1. It gives poetry a typical symmetry that differentiates poetry from prose.

2. It makes recital of poetry a pleasurable experience for the readers, as the repetitive patterns render musicality and rhythm to it.

3. H. Auden gives his views on the function of rhyme and other tools of prosody, saying that these are like servants that a master uses in the ways he wants.

For instance, all nursery rhymes contain rhyming words in order to facilitate learning for children, as they enjoy reading them, and the presence of repetitive patterns enables them to memorize them effortlessly. We do not seem to forget the nursery rhymes we learned as children. Below are a few nursery rhyme examples with rhyming words in bold and italics:

a.

“Baa baa black sheep, have you any wool?

Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full!

One for the master, one for the dame,

And one for the little boy who lives down the lane.”

b.

“Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

All the King’s horses, And all the King’s men

Couldn’t put Humpty together again!”

c.

“Mary had a little lamb its fleece was white as snow;

And everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go.

It followed her to school one day, which was against the rule;

It made the children laugh and play, to see a lamb at school.

And so the teacher turned it out, but still it lingered near,

And waited patiently about till Mary did appear.”

When the rhyming sounds involve only one syllable, it is called masculine rhyme. For example, “cold” and “bold.” When the rhyming sounds involve two or more syllables, it is called feminine rhyme. For example, for example “spitefully” and “delightfully.”

If the one or both rhyming words are within the line, it is called internal rhyme. For example, "the grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother.” If both the rhyming words occur at the ends of lines. it is called end rhyme. For example, "Three poets, in three distant ages born, / Greece, Italy, and England did adorn. End rhyme is the commonest and most consciously sought-after sound repetition in English poetry.

Not all rhymes are so absolute as shown above. To convey their thoughts and feelings more freely and more appropriately, poets, especially modern poets, often use approximate rhymes. Approximate rhymes include words with any kinds of similarity. Among approximate rhymes, the following are more frequently used and easier to detect.

Alliteration is the repetition of consonants, especially at the beginning of words or stressed syllables. For example, "While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping...”

Assonance is the repetition of similar vowel sounds within a noticeable range. For example, "All day the wind breathes low with mellower tone/ Thro' every hollow cave and alley lone.”

Consonance is the repetition of identical consonant sounds before and after different vowels. For example, “tit” and "tat,” “creak” and “crack.”

Half rhyme is the feminine rhymes that do not rhyme completely. For example, “frightful” and “slightly,” “yellow" and “pillow.” Half rhyme is called by others "near rhyme," “oblique rhyme,” or "slant rhyme.”

Eye rhyme is formed by words that look like a rhymed unit but do not have the same sounds. For example, “home” and “some,” “hear” and “bear.”

Rhyme scheme is the pattern of alternating end rhymes in a stanza or poem. In the analysis of a rhyme scheme, each rhyme is represented by a smaller letter, thus a rhyme scheme looks like “ababcc”. For example, rhyme scheme of the following stanza is ababc and marked as:

Love is a sickness full of woes, [a]

All remedies refusing; [b]

A plant that with most cutting grows, [a]

Most barren with best using. [b]

Why so? [c]

Metrical Rhythm

A more complex aspect than the rhyme of poetry is rhythm communicated by the arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllabi. To discuss the rhythm of a poem, the following terms are very useful.

Meter: The word is derived from the Greek word “metron,” meaning “measure.” Meter in poetry is a way of measuring a line of poetry based on the rhythm of the words. The meter of much poetry of the Western world and elsewhere is based on particular patterns of syllables of particular types. In English when applied to poetry, "meter” refers to the regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. Usually, a stressed syllable is marked with “/,” and an unstressed syllable is marked with “U.”

Names for Meters:

Iamb (iambic): an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. Its pattern is like this: U/

anapest (anapestic or anapaestic): two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable. Its pattern is like this: UU/

trochee (trochaic): a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable. Its pattern is like this: /U

dactyl (dactylic): a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables. Its pattern is like this: /UU

spondee (spondaic): a stressed syllable followed by another stressed syllable. Its pattern is like this: / /

Foot: a unit of poetic meter of stressed and unstressed syllables.

Names for Feet:

monometer: one foot

dimeter: two feet

trimester: three feet

tetrameter: tour feet

pentameter: five feet

hexameter: six feet

heptameter: seven feet

octameter: eight feet

Foot is not to be confused with meter, though the names for feet end with “- meter.” Meter is based on syllables, including how stressed and unstressed syllables are arranged. Foot is applied in a single line, including how many meters are employed in that line. Foot in poetry is a unit of stressed and unstressed syllables. For example, to decide what meter is used in the following lines, one will examine how the stressed and unstressed syllables are arranged.

For example, look at this line from Shakespeare: "No longer mourn for me when I am dead." The rhythm is, "bah-BAH bah-BAH bah-BAH bah-BAH bah-BAH. We read it like this: "no LON-ger MOURN for ME when I am DEAD." The type of foot Shakespeare used here is called an iamb. An iamb or an iambic foot has the rhythm bah-BAH. An unstressed syllable, then a stressed one. The iamb is the most common kind of foot in English poetry.

U / U / U / U / U /

Shall I compare thee to a summers day?

U / U / U / U / U /

Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

U / U / U / U / U /

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

U / U / U / U / U /

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:

As shown above, the syllables are arranged in the pattern of the unstressed and stressed (U/), so the meter is iambic. And each of the lines contains five iambic units (iamb), so the lines are written in pentameter. The metrical rhythm of these lines is iambic pentameter. The iamb is the most common kind of foot in English poetry.

Tone

Any speech has a tone, and tone is more important in poetry. Tone is poise, mood, voice, attitude and outlook of the poet. Conveniently tone can be defined as the poet's or the speaker’s attitude towards his subject, his audience, or even himself. Through the tone of a poem, the poet may even show his own personality. Tone is decided by synthetic analysis of all the elements involved in the poem (imagery, metaphor, understatement, etc.), especially its diction and sentence patterns. Though a technical term, it is discussed usually in ordinary vocabulary. For example, the tone of a poem can be described as “cold,”, “eager,” “uncertain,” “boastful,” “protesting,” etc.

Most poems deal with human emotions, and tone is the emotional coloring of a poem. Therefore, it is very important in understanding a poem. To recognize the tone is to adjust the readers relation with the poem and/or with the poet. Failure to determine the tone accurately leads to misunderstanding of the poem.

Usage: All pieces of literature, even official documents and technical documents, have some sort of tone. Authors create tone through the use of various other literary elements, such as diction or word choice; syntax, the grammatical arrangement of words in a text for effect; imagery, or vivid appeals to the senses; details, facts that are included or omitted; and figurative language, the comparison of seemingly unrelated things for sub-textual purposes.

While now used to discuss literature, the term tone was originally applied solely to music. This appropriated word has come to represent attitudes and feelings a speaker (in poetry), a narrator (in fiction), or an author (in non-literary prose) has towards the subject, situation, and/or the intended audience. It is important to recognize that the speaker, or narrator is not to be confused with the author and that attitudes and feelings of the speaker or narrator should not be confused with those of the author. In general, the tone of a piece only refers to attitude of the author if writing is non-literary in nature. In many cases, the tone of a work may change and shift as the speaker or narrator’s perspective on a particular subject alters throughout the piece.

Difference from mood: Tone and mood are not the same, although they are frequently confused. The mood of a piece of literature is the feeling or atmosphere created by the work, or, said slightly differently, how the work makes the reader feel. Mood is produced most effectively through the use of setting, theme, voice and tone, while tone is how the author feels about something.

To an extent, reading literature is a subjective process because different pieces of writing can be interpreted in different ways by the reader. Citing one brief example from Robert Frost's famous "The Road Not Taken" sums up a great deal of information not only about the poem, but also about the effect of tone in general.

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth.

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy6 and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same.

And both that morning equally9 lay

In leaves no step had trodden back.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

Image

Poetry is aimed at conveying and enriching human experience. Experience is formed through sense impressions. For example, one’s experience of spring may come from the visual sense, the green grass and trees; from the auditory sense, the twittering birds and whispering brooks; from the olfactory sense, the sweet flowers and fresh air; from the gustatory sense, the delicious fruits and vegetables available in spring; from the tactile sense, the supple branches and twigs; and from the kinesthetic sense, the fluttering movement of butterflies in the air. Lastly. his experience of spring may come From his general feeling or response to all the things mentioned above, which is pleasant. Therefore, the poet’s business is to evoke such sense impressions in the reader's mind. His method is usually to describe these things in words, or so to speak, to paint word pictures. Such a word picture is an image. Image is the representation of sense experience through language. All the images formed into a meaningful whole in a poem are often called its imagery. Obviously, image is the soul of poetry as language is the body of poetry.

Images come from the senses, but one should be reminded that usually an image does not come from only one sense. One image is frequently the result of the cooperation of the several senses. For example, the image of “fresh air” involves both the olfactory sense (it has a pleasant smell) and the tactile sense (it has a certain degree of coolness; hot air is seldom described as “fresh”). Even more, the image of “fresh air” may evoke certain emotional responses and create mental images or mental pictures by way of association. Fresh air is often associated with morning, forest, mountain, seaside, which are much more suggestive than the air. One should also be reminded that images do not always come from the senses or physical aspects of things. Sometimes an image can be rather abstract. “Death” is as qualified as “coffin” to serve as an image. In Emily Dickinson's poems (and indeed, in some classic poems) this kind of abstract images play an important part.

Imagery often serves in three ways: to create the atmosphere, to provide an internal pattern, and to focus the theme of the poem. Examples are readily available. The first stanza in Poe’s “The Raven” runs like this:

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,

Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,

As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

“’tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door--

Only this, and nothing more.”

A dreary midnight, a weary young man, by himself, reading some unusual ancient book of legendary happenings, in drowsiness. These immediately set up a Gothic atmosphere that is culminated by the tapping at the door

Imagery, to some extent, is capable of organizing a poem or serving as a starting point for interpreting the structure of a poem. One poem by Dickinson is cited here in full:

Because I could not stop for Death

Emily Dickinson

Because I could not stop for Death –

He kindly stopped for me –

The Carriage held but just Ourselves –

And Immortality.

We slowly drove – He knew no haste

And I had put away

My labor and my leisure too,

For His Civility –

We passed the School, where Children strove

At Recess – in the Ring –

We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –

We passed the Setting Sun –

Or rather – He passed us –

The Dews drew quivering and chill –

For only Gossamer, my Gown –

My Tippet – only Tulle –

We paused before a House that seemed

A Swelling of the Ground –

The Roof was scarcely visible –

The Cornice – in the Ground –

Since then – ‘tis Centuries – and yet

Feels shorter than the Day

I first surmised the Horses’ Heads

Were toward Eternity –

At the very beginning there is the image of death, personified by capitalization, driving a carriage. This image foretells that the poem is going to be a “journey poem,” and since death is the driver, the “journey” is going to be a “time travel.” The image of death also pre-orientates the interpretation of “the School,” “Children,” “the Setting Sun,” “Swelling of the Ground,” and others. The images governed by the image of death constitute the internal pattern of the poem and largely determine the interpretation of the whole poem.

Imagery can function more strongly and directly in terms of conveying the poetic theme. It can be used in a central symbol that carries the theme.

Theme

Like any other literary works, a poem is centered on a theme or even themes. However, the theme of a poem is slightly different from the theme of a novel. A novel tends to be thought-provoking, and a poem tends to be emotion-arousing. In discussing poetical theme, it is helpful and, in fact, necessary to make distinction between the total meaning and prose meaning of a poem. The prose meaning is equivalent to the theme of a novel which can be summarized and extracted from the whole work. It is usually an idea, a statement of emotion, a presentation of a character, or the combination of all these. The total meaning is nothing less than the total experience the reader gets from reading the poem. Since a poem is written to convey human experience, this total meaning is almost inseparable from the poem, and it includes the prose meaning.