2 question answering 150 words total

Music in Poetry: Rhythm, Meter, and Rhyme

Some text adapted from www.angelfire.com/ct2/evenski/home.html

In speech, we use rhythm without consciously creating recognizable patterns. For example, almost every telephone conversation ends rhythmically, with the conversants understanding as much by rhythm as by the meaning of the words, that it is time to hang up. Frequently such conversations end with Conversant A uttering a five- or six-syllable line, followed by Conversant B’s five to six syllables, followed by A’s two- to four-syllable line, followed by B’s two to four syllables, and so on until the receivers are cradled.

Well I gotta go now.

Okay, see you later.

Sure, pal. So long.

See you. Take care.

Bye bye.

Bye bye.

The foundations of poetry are imagery and music. The music in a poem comes mostly through rhyme, rhythm and meter. This is what makes poetry different from song lyrics. In song lyrics, the music is external to the language—it comes from musical instruments. In poetry, the music is in the language itself.

Rhythm and meter in poetry begin with feet. A foot is a unit of stressed and/or unstressed syllables.

iamb one unstressed syllable + one stressed syllable “prepare” trochee one stressed syllable + one unstressed “ticket” anapest two unstressed + one stressed syllable “fiancée” dactyl one stressed + two unstressed syllables “dominate” spondee two stressed syllables “take care”

Meter describes the number of feet (or a pattern of footprints) in a single line of poetry.

Monometer = a line with one foot

Dimeter = a line with two feet

Trimeter = a line with three feet

Tetrameter = a line with four feet

Pentameter = a line with five feet

Rhythm describes the pattern of feet in a single line of poetry and in the poem as a whole:

iambic monometer (one iambic foot)

he SITS

iambic dimeter (two iambic feet)

he SITS on CHAIRS

iambic trimeter (three iambic feet)

he SITS on CHAIRS in BARS

iambic tetrameter (four iambic feet)

he SITS on CHAIRS in BARS and THINKS

iambic pentameter (five iambic feet)

he SITS on CHAIRS in BARS and THINKS of CARS

iambic hexameter (six iambic feet)

he SITS on CHAIRS in BARS and THINKS of CARS that BREAK

In poetry, rhythm implies that certain words are produced more force- fully than others, and may be held for longer duration. The repetition of a pattern of such emphasis is what produces a “rhythmic effect.” The word rhythm comes from the Greek, meaning “measured motion.”

In poems, as in songs, a rhythm may be obvious or muted. A poem like Vachel Lindsay’s “The Congo” consciously recreates the rhythms of a tribal dance:

Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room

Barrel-house kings, with feet unstable,

Sagged and reeled and pounded on the table,

Pounded on the table,

Beat an empty barrel with the handle of a broom,

Hard as they were able

Boom, boom, BOOM,

With a silk umbrella and the handle of a broom,

Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM.

On the other hand, some “free verse” has underlying rhythmical patterns that, while variable and not “regular” like Vachel Lindsay’s, do nonetheless give a feeling of unity to the work. For example, read aloud the following lines a few times:

A chimney, breathing a little smoke.

The sun, I can’t see

making a bit of pink

I can’t quite see in the blue.

The pink of five tulips

at five P.M. on the day before March first.

Pretty straightforward stuff, isn’t it? What’s challenging for beginning writers is to pay attention to the sound of poetry—it’s music. When we see words on a page, we tend to read them for their content—what they say. But remember, because poetry is on the far right of the writing continuum, language is apparent. That means we have to pay attention to the words themselves, including the sound and sound patterns they create. The meaning in poetry lies not only in what the words say, but in the experience of the language itself.

Rhythm and Repetition

Repetition of a sound, syllable, word, phrase, line, stanza, or metrical pattern is a basic unifying device in all poetry.

Repetition of sounds is the basis for rhyme and alliteration. Repetition of patterns of accents is the basis for rhythm.

Sometimes, repetition reinforces or even substitutes for meter (the beat), the other chief controlling factor of poetry.

Primitive religious chants from all cultures show repetition. Frequently, the exact repetition of words in the same metrical pattern at regular intervals forms a refrain, which serves to set off or divide narrative into segments, as in ballads.

Repetition is found extensively in free verse, which does not have a traditional, recognizable metrical pattern. Repetition in free verse includes parallelism (repetition of a grammar pattern) and the repetition of important words and phrases. This helps to distinguish free verse from prose (anything that is not poetry).

*****

From: www.uni.edu/~gotera/CraftOfPoetry/repetition.html:

Repetition can accumulate the music and the feeling in a poem. For example, in the second stanza of D. H. Lawrence's "Bavarian Gentians":

Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark

darkening the day-time, torch-like with the smoking blossoms of Pluto's gloom,

ribbed and torch-like, with their blaze of darkness spread blue

down flattening into points, flattened under the sweep of white day

torch-flower of the blue-smoking darkness, Pluto's dark-blue daze,

black lamps from the halls of Dis, burning dark blue,

giving off darkness, blue darkness, as Demeter's pale lamps give off light,

lead me then, lead the way.

First, there are repetitions of words ("dark," "torch," "blue," and "flatten"). Second, the repetitions of sounds: alliteration ("dark," "day," "Dis"; "blaze," "black," "blue"); assonance ("blaze," "day," "pale"); consonance ("daze" with "Dis"; "light" with "lead"); and rhyme ("blue" and "blue"; "day" and "way"). Third, repetition of syntax ("big and dark" and "ribbed and torch-like"; "Pluto's dark-blue daze" and "Demeter's pale lamps").

Lawrence uses repetition much like a jazz musician repeating riffs with small alterations in each go-round.

Rhyme

Adapted from notes by poet Vince Gotera

Let's use Gwendolyn Brooks's poem "We Real Cool" (Strong Measures 38) to illustrate some different methods of creating rhyme and music in poetry. Here's the whole poem:

WE REAL COOL

The Pool Players. Seven at the Golden Shovel.

We real cool. We

Left school. We

Lurk late. We

Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We

Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We

Die soon.

Obviously, there's lots of rhyme here, such as "cool. We" and "school. We", or "sin. We" and "gin. We" ... right? Words and phrases that rhyme perfectly are called, oddly, perfect rhyme.

There are also examples of slant rhyme (sometimes called near rhyme), such as "sing" and "Thin" in the middle of the next line, or "real" and "school" in the first two lines.

Rhymes like “cool” and “school,” which occur at the ends of lines, are called external rhymes. Besides these external rhymes, there are also internal rhymes (rhymes that occur in the middle of lines). For example, "sin" with "Thin."

Of the more familiar rhyme types, the one conspicuously missing is "eye rhyme" where two words look like they ought to rhyme fully but don't. Such as "full" and "lull" or "door" and "poor." Perhaps, though, Brooks wanted a deterministic pattern of sound that eye rhyme would not have enhanced.

Other kinds of sound effects have to do with the type of sound. For example, the repetition of vowels, called assonance. Note the short "i" sound in "Sing sin" repeated again in the next line. Alliteration refers to the use of repeated consonant sounds at the beginning of words. For example, notice the "l" sounds in "Lurk late" or the "str" repetition in "Strike straight." The soft "g" or "j" sound in "gin" is echoed by "Jazz" and "June."

Okay, so what?

What rhyme and music do is contribute to a poem's meaning by providing sonic texture and unity—an impression that the poem is an interwoven whole of sound and sense. A poem's music, in great part, tells us that that poem is a poem. The play of sound is often what seems immediately "poetic" to the reader.

—Vince Gotera

My Papa’s Waltz Theodore Roethke

The whiskey on your breath Could make a small boy dizzy; (1) But I hung on like death: Such waltzing was not easy. We romped until the pans Slid from the kitchen shelf; My mother’s countenance Could not unfrown itself. The hand that held my wrist Was battered on one knuckle; At every step you missed (2) My right ear scraped a buckle. You beat time on my head With a palm caked hard by dirt, (3) Then waltzed me off to bed Still clinging to your shirt.

(1) Read the poem aloud to gain a sense of how the speaker uses three-syllable and four-syllable patterns in the meter to emphasize the waltz: “The WHISkey on your BREATH / Could MAKE a small boy DIZzy.” (2) The fact that the second half of the poem does not precisely repeat the metrical pattern of the first half of the poem suggests that the father misses some steps. (3) Based on the units of threes and fours that comprise a waltz, the syllables in each line follow this pattern: 6,7,6,7—6,6,6,6—6,7,6,7—6,7,6,6. Note that line 14 breaks what would otherwise be an exact repetition of the first half of the poem. The one dispensable syllable in this line is the word hard—in other words, the line would make sense without it. The word hard thus disrupts the poem’s otherwise perfect meter, and we should give it special attention. The speaker has tried to render his father’s dance in a precise, metrical way, but his father’s drunken missteps make it impossible to do so. The second half of the poem is generally tougher, with short, hard-sounding words and true end rhyme. There are no slant rhymes here; the structure is less relaxed, which leaves the reader feeling tense and uneasy.

My Father's Signature

Bryan Walpert

How it swirls across the page, a series of loops like a planet in orbit, as though he seeks a center after seeing its resurrection a thousand times on paintings of trees and autumn

leaves adrift in abstract autumn days, each day unpeeling paint from a page, each leaf an abstract painting to encircle this studio, an orbit of leaves resurrected like a series of letters seeking

surface after surface, a search by someone trying to stay, an autumn refusing to believe in its resurrection as seed from snow—itself a page of shapes, each flake only itself, no orbit of remembrance and return, though a painting

might capture how the earth paints itself with an absence of color that seeks to uncover everything from itself, as an orbit of line in the shape of autumn reveals dark limbs against the page he's left blank in spots, resurrecting

stars long dead and resurrected by distance, a pointillist painting teaching us to distrust the page, as he distrusts it, seeking then discarding it, as autumn trees discard themselves when our orbit

tilts us from the sun, an orbit that promises resurrection, if only as memory of autumn in the green of the paint of a fresh season that seeks to cover winter's blankest page, the way a signature, in the autumn of an orbit, seeks a page on which to paint its resurrection.