Recognising poetry

Earlier this month, the UK celebrated National Poetry Day. Across the media there was a feast of readings and a special focus in many schools.

Verse that lives on

Poetry is an enduring medium. Since the earliest days of our oral culture, handing down dramatic narratives in verse form helped make them more memorable for both the teller and the audience. Gathering together to listen to these verse stories was the equivalent of watching the telly together today, drawn in by a dramatic tale.

An exam expectation

Poetry is a key component of all A Level English Literature syllabuses today and, apart from studying the output of well-known poets, examiners also like to put candidates on the spot by asking for an analysis of a previously unseen poem. Students are expected to recognise what style of text they are looking at, so that they can see how the author has played with – or against – the expectations of that particular genre. But how are you meant to know?

At crossref-it.info you’ll find an entire section under ‘Aspects of poetry’ dealing with Recognising poetic form. Each brief article explains what is meant by a particular genre, the era in which it was most prevalent and the stylistic aspects by which it can be recognised. And this week three new articles have been added to the section.

What is alliterative poetry?

One of the earliest types of poetry in the English language was what we now call alliterative poetry:

• Rather than grouping thoughts together by a connecting rhyme-scheme (e.g. rhyming couplets) Old and Middle English alliterative poetry contained stressed words which alliterated, giving energy and narrative flow to the verse
• A very early example is Beowulf, an epic poem probably composed in the sixth century CE
• The alliterative genre endured until about 1500 and another well-known example is Piers Plowman, written by a contemporary of Chaucer’s, William Langland. 

To find an example of how the verse works, visit here.

Ballads

Another more enduring style of poem is the ballad. Originally associated with song, these simple rhyming folk narratives captured dramatic situations in an easily repeatable form and often served as commentaries on the events of the day. Later the genre was also employed by learned writers who wanted to capture the genre’s expectations of simple and direct communication. Find out more here.

Help!

Both ballads and alliterative poems are fairly easy to recognise, with regular rhymes or rhythms or familiar subject matter. But what if what you are looking at doesn’t seem to obey any of the ‘rules’ you expect of poetry, with no consistent metre, stanza form or rhyme-scheme for example?

Free verse

You may find you are analysing what is known as free verse. This twentieth century development echoed the modernist desire to forge new literary forms which were not tied to the constraints of tradition. Have a look here and see what you think.

Then watch out for more helpful definitions of poetic styles in November!

This week’s National Poetry Day celebrates LIGHT!

National Poetry Day on Thursday 8th October celebrates how poets have reflected on the theme of light.

What do you associate with it? If you are dragging yourself out of bed to get ready for school/college because a new day has dawned, you might empathise with John Donne. Having spent a seductive night with his beloved, facing up to the sunlight is the last thing he wants to do. This is turned into a witty complaint in The Sunne Rising, where he castigates the sun as a ‘Busy old fool,’ and ‘Saucy pedantic wretch’ for disturbing him.

The hopefulness of light

Yet literature through the ages reflects humanity’s primeval desire for light, whether it is the natural light of the sun, or lamp/firelight to counteract encroaching darkness. Given that darkness is so frequently associated with fear, light naturally comes to be associated with hope.

Certainly that is what the speaker of Wilfred Owen’s war poem Futility is relying on. Finding a colleague in the dawn after a bitter night, Owen personifies the sun as a nurturing, creative being whom he trusts will know how to rouse the inert soldier, just as it manages to bring forth life from seeds.

In a relatively short poem, there are seven references to the act of waking / getting up (l.2,4,6,8,9,11,14) and Owen may have been thinking of a well-known New Testament verse: ‘Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you’ (Ephesians 5:14).

But the sun cannot do what Owen desires, cannot bring the dead to life. As the poem’s speaker realises that his comrade is beyond the sun’s help, he decries its ‘fatuous sunbeams’ l.13. It is as if the sun isn’t trying hard enough, is unfeeling and careless. Instead of symbolising life, it comes to represent the meaninglessness of life.

False light, false hope

Reflecting the desolation of warfare, another of Owen’s poems undercuts the association of light and hope. In The Sentry, the ‘whizz bangs ... snuffling the candles’ l.11 throw the confined dug-out into darkness and its sentry into blindness. The dramatic irony of the poem relies on the light which, for the sentry, symbolises sight. He cannot see the candle flame when it is held close to his blinded eyes, yet when all the lights have gone out he shouts that they are visible.

Symbolically, the extinction of the lights in the dug-out represents the loss of hope in Owen and those like him. Whether the sentry is able to see or not, what is there worth noting in the nightmarish hell that humanity has created through warfare? The man’s blindness represents his self-deception about hope for the future.

Eternal constancy

Certainly man-made light is easily snuffed out and can thus be associated with fragility and inconstancy. Which is why Keats chooses a star as his symbol of enduring love. His Bright Star is ‘steadfast’ and ‘unchangeable’, seemingly eternal, just as Keats wishes his moment of rest in the bosom of his beloved to be.

But what about your associations with light? Why not get creative today and send in your own poem which reflects on this theme to info@crossref-it.info?