Week: 5

LECTURE 5: POETRY

Lecture Synopsis:

 Poet and their times

 Analysis and their time
 Theme and main idea
 Form
 Diction (word choice)
 Tone
 Imagery
 Rhythm
 Rhyme
 Metre

Poems -is a piece of writing in which the expression of feelings and ideas is
given intensity by particular attention to diction (sometimes involving rhyme),
rhythm, and imagery.
Poem is a composition in verse. It paints pictures by means of poetic devices
such as figurative language, rhythm and rhyme.

Poets and their times

Poet reflect the event and idea of their times through poetry.
An understanding of the poet’s time may lead to an understanding of his ideas.

Chaucer’s poetry differs from that of T.S. Eliot

Geoffrey Chaucer (circa 1340-1400) is generally considered to be the first major

English poet and the greatest English poet of the Medieval Period. He is best
known for The Canterbury Tales but was also a master of lyric forms such as the
rondel and balade. Chaucer has been called the "Father of English literature"

I have translated three poems by Chaucer that make me think he was a great
poet:

Three Roundels by Geoffrey Chaucer

I. Merciles Beaute ("Merciless Beauty")

by Geoffrey Chaucer
translation by Michael R. Burch

Your eyes slay me suddenly;

their beauty I cannot sustain,
they wound me so, through my heart keen.

Unless your words heal me hastily,

my heart's wound will remain green;
for your eyes slay me suddenly;
their beauty I cannot sustain.
By all truth, I tell you faithfully
that you are my life and my death, my queen ...
for at my death this truth shall be seen:
your eyes slay me suddenly;
their beauty I cannot sustain,
they wound me so, through my heart keen.

Original text:

Your yën two wol sle me sodenly,

I may the beaute of hem not sustene,
So woundeth hit through-out my herte kene.

And but your word wol helen hastily

My hertes wounde, whyl that hit is grene,
Your yën two wol sle me sodenly;
may the beaute of hem not sustene.

Upon my trouthe I sey yow feithfully,

That ye ben of my lyf and deth the quene;
For with my deth the trouthe shal be sene.
Your yën two wol sle me sodenly,
I may the beaute of hem not sustene,
So woundeth hit through-out my herte kene.

II. Rejection
by Geoffrey Chaucer
translation by Michael R. Burch

Your beauty from your heart has so erased

Pity, that it’s useless to complain;
For Pride now holds your mercy by a chain.

Though guiltless, my death sentence has been cast.

I tell you truly, needless now to feign,—
Your beauty from your heart has so erased
Pity, that it’s useless to complain.

Alas, that Nature in your face compassed

Such beauty, that no man may hope attain
To mercy, though he perish from the pain;
Your beauty from your heart has so erased
Pity, that it’s useless to complain;
For Pride now holds your mercy by a chain.

Original text:

So hath your beaute fro your herte chaced

Pitee, that me ne availeth not to pleyne;
For Daunger halt your mercy in his cheyne.
Giltles my deth thus han ye me purchaced;
I sey yow soth, me nedeth not to feyne;
So hath your beaute fro your herle chaced
Pilee, that me ne availeth not to pleyne

Allas! that nature hath in yow compassed

So gret beaute, that no man may atteyne
To mercy, though he sterve for the peyne.
So hath your beaute fro your herte chaced
Pitee, that me ne availeth not to pleyne;
For daunger halt your mercy in his cheyne.

III. Escape
by Geoffrey Chaucer
translation by Michael R. Burch

Since I’m escaped from Love and yet still fat,

I never plan to be in his prison lean;
Since I am free, I count it not a bean.

He may question me and counter this and that;

I care not: I will answer just as I mean.
Since I’m escaped from Love and yet still fat,
I never plan to be in his prison lean.

Love strikes me from his roster, short and flat,

And he is struck from my books, just as clean.
Forevermore; there is no other mean.
Since I’m escaped from Love and yet still fat,
I never plan to be in his prison lean;
Since I am free, I count it not a bean.

Original text:

Sin I fro love escaped am so fat,

I never thenk to ben in his prison lene;
Sin I am fre, I counte him not a bene.

He may answere, and seye this or that;

I do no fors, I speke right as I mene.
Sin I fro love escaped am so fat,
I never thenk to ben in his prison lene.

Love hath my name y-strike out of his sclat,

And he is strike out of my bokes clene
For ever-mo; [ther] is non other mene.
Sin I fro love escaped am so fat,
I never thenk to ben in his prison lene;
Sin I am fre, I counte him not a bene.
Explicit.

T.S. Eliot, in full Thomas Stearns Eliot, (born September 26, 1888, St.
Louis, Missouri, U.S.—died January 4, 1965,London , England), American-English
poet, playwright, literary critic, and editor, a leader of the Modernist movement
in poetry in such works as The Waste Land (1922) and Four Quartets (1943). Eliot
 exercised a strong influence on Anglo-American culture from the 1920s until late
in the century. His experiments in diction, style, and versification revitalized
English poetry, and in a series of critical essays he shattered old orthodoxies and
erected new ones. The publication of Four Quartets led to his recognition as the
greatest living English poet and man of letters, and in 1948 he was awarded both
the Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize for Literature.

What the Thunder Said

After the torchlight red on sweaty faces

After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and palace and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience

Here is no water but only rock

Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
If there were only water amongst the rock
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit
Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit
There is not even silence in the mountains
But dry sterile thunder without rain
There is not even solitude in the mountains
But red sullen faces sneer and snarl
From doors of mudcracked houses

If there were water

And no rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only
Not the cicada
And dry grass singing
But sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
—But who is that on the other side of you?

What is that sound high in the air

Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal

A woman drew her long black hair out tight

And fiddled whisper music on those strings
And bats with baby faces in the violet light
Whistled, and beat their wings
And crawled head downward down a blackened wall
And upside down in air were towers
Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours
And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.

In this decayed hole among the mountains

In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel
There is the empty chapel, only the wind’s home.
It has no windows, and the door swings,
Dry bones can harm no one.
Only a cock stood on the rooftree
Co co rico co co rico
In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust
Bringing rain

Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves

Waited for rain, while the black clouds
Gathered far distant, over Himavant.
The jungle crouched, humped in silence.
Then spoke the thunder
DA
Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms
DA
Dayadhvam: I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison
Only at nightfall, aethereal rumours
Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus
DA
Damyata: The boat responded
Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar
The sea was calm, your heart would have responded
Gaily, when invited, beating obedient
To controlling hands

Knowledge of a poet’s background also gives us an insight into his

poetry

Welfred owen (war poet)

Wilfred Owen (1893–1918) is widely regarded as one of Britain’s greatest war

poets. Writing from the perspective of his intense personal experience of the
front line, his poems, including ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ and ‘Dulce et
Decorum Est’, bring to life the physical and mental trauma of combat. Owen’s
aim was to tell the truth about what he called ‘the pity of War’.

Oswald Mtshali (South African Apartheid poet)

Mbuyiseni Oswald Mtshali was born in Kwabhanya, which falls within what is now
Kwazulu-Natal, in 1940. After completing secondary school he studied by
correspondence, getting a diploma with the Premier School of Journalism and
Authorship. He worked as a messenger in Johannesburg, drawing on his
observations of the city to write the poems that became his first
collection, Sounds of a Cowhide Drum. It is one of the best-selling poetry books
in South African history. Although he wrote his poetry in the 1970s and 1980s, its
focus on oppression and experiences of black life under racial capitalism means
that it captures many dynamics which are central to how South Africa has
historically worked. These were already well established before the formal arrival
of Apartheid, and include systems of cheap migrant labor on farms and in mines,
and white ownership of land and the economy.

Samuel Coleridge (Opium Addict)

As is well known, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an opium addict. He took opium
in the form of laudanum, that is to say tincture of opium in alcohol, which he
drank by the pint. In addition, he was no mean bibber of claret; not a 21-unit-a-
week man (or whatever the latest safe level of consumption is), but more like an
all-you-can-drink man

We often refer to school of poets

The metaphysical poets e.g. John Donne
The romantic poets e.g. William Wordswarth
The war poets e.g. Rupert Brooke
 Analysis and their time
 Theme and main idea
 Form
 Diction (word choice)
 Tone
 Imagery
 Rhythm
 Rhyme
 Metre

To analyse a poem, you must break it down into all its important elements and
explain how they work together to create an effect or reinforce a meaning.

Summarize
Before you break the poem apart, identify its basic content. You should be able
to summarize your poem. Creating a summary will focus your thoughts about the
poem. However, you may not need to include it when you write your analysis,
since you can usually assume your readers will know what the poem is about.
Example. Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” is about a man who is haunted by a
raven and the memory of the woman he loved.

It‘s also sometimes helpful to label the sections of a poem. Can you find a
pattern of organization? Stanzas (Verses) may be a guide, but even poems not
divided into obvious stanzas may have sections that function differently. A
Shakespearian sonnet, for example, can be divided into four parts. It may help to
write down what each section says.
Ex. Shakespeare’s Sonnet XIV, “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?”
Section 1- She’s more lovely than summer because she’s warmer and gentler
than summer.
Section 2 – She’s fairer because the sun doesn’t always shine and summer’s
beauty fades.
Section 3- Her beauty will never fade and she will never die.
Couplet – All of this is because the poet has made her and her loveliness
immortal with his poetry.

THEME (Main Idea)

The theme is a recurring idea or a pervading thought in a work of literature.
Poetry themes include some common ideas such as love, nature, beauty, and as
complex as death, spirituality, and immortality. An understanding of the theme
helps readers to identify the core message of the poem or the poet’s purpose for
writing the poem. For example, the following lines of Robert Burns’ ‘A Red, Red
Rose’ exemplify the theme as well as the underlying message of the entire
poem:
O my Luve is like a red, red rose
That’s newly sprung in June;
O my Luve is like the melody
That’s sweetly played in tune.
This piece is written in admiration of the speaker’s beloved. Therefore, the main
themes of the poem are beauty, love, and admiration.

Structure and Form

Poetry comes in a variety of forms and in each form follows a specific structure.
For example, the sonnet form containing a set structure is different from odes.
A free verse poem does not have the metrical regularity, which can be found in
a blank verse poem.
The structural elements found in poetry are:
 Stanza: is a group of lines set off from others by a blank line or
indentation.
 Verse: are stanzas with no set number of lines that make up units based
on sense.
 Canto: is a stanza pattern found in medieval and modern long poetry.

Diction, Imagery, Metaphor

 Because a poem is generally compact, every word is important. Examine
the words (diction) and how they’re used to create an impression that
evokes the senses of touch, taste, smell, sight, or sound (imagery).
Comparisons (metaphor or simile) are also powerful ways poets create an
impression or convey an idea. For example, Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem
“Two Countries” is about loneliness and finding love again:
 Skin remembers how long the years grow
when skin is not touched, a gray tunnel
of singleness, feather lost from the tail
of a bird, swirling onto a step,
swept away by someone who never saw it was a feather.

 Nye uses metaphor by comparing loneliness to “a gray tunnel” and a

“feather lost from the tail of a bird.” The tunnel signifies a void with no
end. The fact that the tunnel is gray renders it vague and ghostly.
Consider the difference it would have made if she’d described the tunnel
as black. The feather, a delicate, tiny thing that was once part of a greater
whole, is now listless and lost. These metaphors portray loneliness as an
empty and floating nothingness, without direction or end.
 Nye also uses imagery. She talks of the feather “swirling onto a step” and
“swept away by someone who never saw it was a feather.” Here, the
feather is personified, looking for welcome but carelessly brushed aside by
someone who just didn’t see it. This imagery evokes the sense of touch,
presenting the human as a delicate, hopeful thing easily brushed aside.
Finally, Nye chose to refer to a person as “skin.” This diction immediately
creates an intimacy between the subject and the reader, something we
can feel and touch.

Tone
Tone is difficult to define concretely because it’s essentially the mood, which can
be personal to each reader. Consider the effect of these words from Robert
Frost’s “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening”:
The woods are lovely, dark, and deep
but I have promises to keep
and miles to go before I sleep
and miles to go before I sleep

The first line creates a comforting haven of the woods, a slumberous peace. The
next three lines are those of a weary traveller. The repetition of “miles to go
before I sleep” makes the reader feel the narrator’s longing for rest along with
his resigned determination to finish what he’s started. Contrast Frost’s words
with these from “The Congo” by Vachel Lindsay:
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

Lindsay writes about the way men in the African Congo murder over diamonds
and gold. A heavy, deep, chanting rhythm creates a primal tone of force and
foreboding to match his subject matter.

Rhyme and Rhyme Scheme

Rhyme is the repetitive pattern of sounds found in poetry. They are used to
reinforce a pattern or rhyme scheme. In specific poetry forms such
as ballads, sonnets, and couplets, the rhyme scheme is an important element.
The common types of rhymes used in poetry are:
 End Rhyme: is a common type of rhyme in poetry that occurs when the
last word of two or more lines rhyme.
 Imperfect Rhyme: is a type of rhyme that occurs in words that do not have
an identical sound.
 Internal Rhyme: occurs in the middle of lines in poetry.
 Masculine Rhyme: is the rhyming between stressed syllables at the end of
verse lines.
 Feminine Rhyme: is the rhyming between unstressed syllables at the end
of verse lines.

Sound and Rhythm

Sound and rhythm are other important elements of poetry. The sound of a poetic
text means how a line or what sounds some specific words evoke in readers’
minds. Rhythm is a set pattern that is formed by these sounds. In poetry, rhythm
refers to the metrical rhythm that involves the arrangement of syllables into
repeating patterns called feet. For example, the following lines from William
Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet 116’ contain an iambic rhythm with a few variations:
Let me/ not to/ the mar/-riage of/ true minds
Ad-mit/ im-pe/-di-ments./ Love is/ not love
Which al/-ters when/ it al/-te-ra/-tion finds,
Or bends/ with the/ re-mo/-ver to/ re-move:

Meter
Meter is the definitive pattern found in verse. Some of the important metrical
feet in English poetry include:
 Iamb: consists of one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable,
as in des-pair, ex-clude, re-peat, etc.
 Trochee: is a metrical foot containing one stressed syllable followed by an
unstressed syllable, as in sis-ter, flow-er, splin-ter, etc.
 Dactyl: comprised one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed
syllables, as in si-mi-lar.
 Anapest: consists of three syllables, where the first two are unstressed
and the last one is stressed, as in com-pre-hend.
 Spondee: contains two stressed syllables, like “drum beat”.
 Pyrrhic: is the opposite of spondee and contains two unstressed syllables.
Poets utilize these metrical feet to create a pattern, which is called a metrical
pattern or metrical scheme. Some of the important metrical patterns include:
 Iambic pentameter: occurs when the lines of a poem contain five iambs
each. Shakespeare’s sonnets are written in this meter.
 Iambic tetrameter: is another important metrical pattern. It occurs when
the lines have four iambs each, as in Robert Frost‘s poem ‘Stopping by
Woods on a Snowy Evening’.
 Trochaic tetrameter: is the recurring pattern of four trochees per line.
In ‘The Song of Hiawatha,’ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow uses this meter.
 Trochaic octameter: occurs when verse lines contain eight trochees
each. Edgar Allan Poe’s best-known poem ‘The Raven’ is written in this
meter.