Introduction To Poetry—Billy Collins

1. Introduction To Poetry—Billy Collins I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem's room and feel the walls for a light switch. I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author's name on the shore. But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.

2. Basic Elements of Poetry

3. Rhythm This is the music made by the statements of the poem, which includes the syllables in the lines. The best method of understanding this is to read the poem aloud, and understand the stressed and unstressed syllables. Listen for the sounds and the music made when we hear the lines spoken aloud. How do the words sound with each other? How do the words flow when they are linked with one another? Does it sound right? Do the words fit with each other? These are the things you consider while studying the rhythm of the poem.

4. Meter • Meter refers to the pattern of syllables in a line of poetry. • The most basic unit of measure in a poem is the syllable and the pattern of syllables in a line, from stressed to unstressed or vice versa. • This is the meter. Syllables are paired two and three at a time, depending on the stresses in the sentence.

5. Iambic Pentameter • Two syllables together, or three if it’s a three-syllable construction, is known as a foot. • So in a line of poetry the cow would be considered one foot. Because when you say the words, the is unstressed and cow is stressed, it can be represented as da DUM. An unstressed/stressed foot is known as an iamb. That’s where the term iambic comes from.

6. Pentameter is simply penta, which means 5, meters. So a line of poetry written in pentameter has 5 feet, or 5 sets of stressed and unstressed syllables. • In basic iambic pentameter, a line would have 5 feet of iambs, which is an unstressed and then a stressed syllable. For example: • If you would put the key inside the lock • This line has 5 feet, so it’s written in pentameter. And the stressing pattern is all iambs: if YOU | would PUT | the KEY | inSIDE | the LOCK da DUM | da DUM | da DUM | da DUM | da DUM

7. When I..|..con SID..|..erHOW..|..my LIFE..|..is SPENT

8. Sonnet • A sonnet is a poem that expresses a single, complete thought, idea, or sentiment. • A sonnet is a poem consisting of 14 lines (iambic pentameter) with a particular rhyming scheme: Examples of a rhyming scheme: #1) ababcdcdefefgg #2) abbacddceffegg #3) abbaabbacdcdcd

9. Breakdown Sonnet Form Quatrain Octave Couplet

10. Sonnet 18 Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?Thou art more lovely and more temperate.Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,And summer's lease hath all too short a date. Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,And often is his gold complexion dimmed;And every fair from fair sometime declines,By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimmed; But thy eternal summer shall not fade,Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest,Nor shall death brag thou wanderest in his shade,When in eternal lines to time thou growest. So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

11. Whose woods these are I think I know.    His house is in the village though;    He will not see me stopping here    To watch his woods fill up with snow.    My little horse must think it queer    To stop without a farmhouse near    Between the woods and frozen lake    The darkest evening of the year.    He gives his harness bells a shake    To ask if there is some mistake.    The only other sound’s the sweep    Of easy wind and downy flake.    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.

13. Villanelle A villanelle is one of the toughest forms of poetry to write. This is, in part, because the villanelle is a form that relies on repetition, which makes it hard for the author to progress further into the poem without it having a feeling of not moving forward. When done right, however, the villanelle is a truly amazing poetic form to write in.

14. Villanelle • The villanelle consists of 19 lines. These lines are separated into six stanzas, all of which have three lines except the last, which has four lines. • In a villanelle, there are two lines that will be constantly repeated throughout the entire poem, so it’s important to choose these two lines well. • They have to be something that can work well in many contexts and that can progress the poem towards a conclusion without sounding like you’re repeating the same thing over and over again.

15. A1bA2abA1 (refrain)abA2 (refrain)abA1 (refrain)abA2 (refrain)abA1 (refrain)A2 (refrain)A1bA2abA1 (refrain)abA2 (refrain)abA1 (refrain)abA2 (refrain)abA1 (refrain)A2 (refrain)

16. Writing Villanelle—Edwin A. Robinson • The first thing you need for a villanelle is a pair of rhyming lines that are the heart of your meaning They are all gone away There is nothing more to say.

17. Now put an unrhymed line between these two, to make a three-line stanza: They are all gone away,The House is shut and still,There is nothing more to say. (This is your first stanza, five more to go)

18. The 2nd stanza begins with a line that rhymes with the basic couplet, a line that rhymes with the middle line you added, and (this is the key to this form) the first line of the couplet repeated: Through broken walls and grayThe winds blow bleak and shrill:They are all gone away.

19. The 3rd stanza has a first line rhyming with "away" and "say," followed by a line rhyming with "still," and then the second line of the couplet repeated: Nor is there one todayTo speak them good or ill:There is nothing more to say.

20. You see how the two lines of the base couplet become more and more meaningful with each repetition. That is why the success of the form depends so much on the careful selection of the couplet.

21. The poem then goes on this way for a total of five three-line stanzas, alternating the two base lines, and ends with a sixth stanza that adds the second line of the stanza one more time: Why is it then we stray  Around the shrunken sill?They are all gone away. And our poor fancy-play  For them is wasted skill:There is nothing more to say. There is ruin and decayIn the House on the Hill:They are all gone away,There is nothing more to say.

22. Do not go gentle into that good night,Old age should burn and rave at close of day;Rage, rage, against the dying of the light. Though Wise men at their end know dark is right,Because their words had forked no lightning theyDo not go gentle into that good night. Good men, the last wave by, crying how brightTheir frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,Do not go gentle into that good night. Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sightBlind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,Rage, rage against the dying of the light. And you, my father, there on the sad height,Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.Do not go gentle into that good night.Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

24. Sestina • The sestina follows a strict pattern of the repetition of the initial six end-words of the first stanza through the remaining five six-line stanzas, culminating in a three-line envoi. The lines may be of any length, though in its initial incarnation, the sestina followed a syllabic restriction. The form is as follows, where each numeral indicates the stanza position and the letters represent end-words: • 1. ABCDEF2. FAEBDC3. CFDABE4. ECBFAD5. DEACFB6. BDFECA7. (envoi) ECA or ACE

25. A Miracle for Breakfast At six o'clock we were waiting for coffee, waiting for coffee and the charitable crumb that was going to be served from a certain balcony --like kings of old, or like a miracle. It was still dark. One foot of the sun steadied itself on a long ripple in the river. The first ferry of the day had just crossed the river. It was so cold we hoped that the coffee would be very hot, seeing that the sun was not going to warm us; and that the crumb would be a loaf each, buttered, by a miracle. At seven a man stepped out on the balcony. He stood for a minute alone on the balcony looking over our heads toward the river. A servant handed him the makings of a miracle, consisting of one lone cup of coffee and one roll, which he proceeded to crumb, his head, so to speak, in the clouds--along with the sun. 

26. Was the man crazy? What under the sun was he trying to do, up there on his balcony! Each man received one rather hard crumb, which some flicked scornfully into the river, and, in a cup, one drop of the coffee. Some of us stood around, waiting for the miracle. I can tell what I saw next; it was not a miracle. A beautiful villa stood in the sun and from its doors came the smell of hot coffee. In front, a baroque white plaster balcony added by birds, who nest along the river, --I saw it with one eye close to the crumb-- and galleries and marble chambers. My crumb my mansion, made for me by a miracle, through ages, by insects, birds, and the river working the stone. Every day, in the sun, at breakfast time I sit on my balcony with my feet up, and drink gallons of coffee. We licked up the crumb and swallowed the coffee. A window across the river caught the sun as if the miracle were working, on the wrong balcony.

28. Ballad • A popular narrative song passed down orally. In the English tradition, it usually follows a form of rhymed (abcb) quatrains alternating four-stress and three-stress lines. Folk (or traditional) ballads are anonymous and recount tragic, comic, or heroic stories with emphasis on a central dramatic event.

30. Ode • A formal, often ceremonious lyric poem that addresses and often celebrates a person, place, thing, or idea. Its stanza forms vary. The Greek or Pindaric (Pindar, ca. 552–442 B.C.E.) ode was a public poem, usually set to music, that celebrated athletic victories. • English odes were also written in the Pindaric tradition • Horatian odes, after the Latin poet Horace (65–8 B.C.E.), were written in quatrains in a more philosophical, contemplative manner • The Sapphic ode consists of quatrains, three 11-syllable lines, and a final five-syllable line, unrhyming but with a strict meter. • The odes of the English Romantic poets vary in stanza form. They often address an intense emotion at the onset of a personal crisis (see Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode,”) or celebrate an object or image that leads to revelation (see John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” and “To Autumn”).

31. William Wordsworth “Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth, and every common sight To me did seem Apparelledin celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream. It is not now as it hath been of yore;-- Turn wheresoe'er I may, By night or day, The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

33. Limerick • A fixed light-verse form of five generally anapestic lines rhyming AABBA. Edward Lear, who popularized the form, fused the third and fourth lines into a single line with internal rhyme. Limericks are traditionally bawdy or just irreverent • Anapest: A metrical foot consisting of two unaccented syllables followed by an accented syllable. The words “underfoot” and “overcome” are anapestic.

34. There was an Old Man with a BeardBY EDWARD LEARThere was an Old Man with a beard,Who said, "It is just as I feared!—Two Owls and a Hen, four Larks and a Wren,Have all built their nests in my beard.

36. Color Chart Examples • Find examples of poetry lines using a certain color. • Quote the line in the right-hand column of your color chart. Remember to cite the poet and poem. • Use previous student work, literature books, poetry books, the poems we’ve used in class, or cite examples from your own work.