Theme: Understanding poetry

Lecture 8

Additional.

Participle II, like participle I, denotes processual quality. It has only one form, traditionally treated in practical grammar as the verbal “third form”, used to build the analytical forms of the passive and the perfect of finites, e.g.: is taken; has taken. The categorial meanings of the perfect and the passive are implicitly conveyed by participle II in its free use, for example, when it functions as a predicative or an attribute, e.g.: He answered through a firmly locked door (participle II as an attribute); The room was big and brightly lit (participle II as a predicative). The functioning of participle II is often seen as adverbial in cases like the following: When asked directly about the purpose of her visit she answered vaguely. But such constructions present cases of syntactic compression rather than an independent participle II used adverbially, cf.: When asked directly ß When she was asked directly … Thus, participle II can be characterized as a verbid combining verbal features (processual semantics and combinability) with the features of the adjective.

Like any other verbid, participle II can form semi-predicative constructions if combined with the inner subject of its own; they include complex object with participle II, e.g.: I’d like to have my hair cut; We found the door locked; complex subject with participle II (the passive transformation of the complex object constructions), e.g.: The door was found firmly locked; and absolute participial construction with participle II, e.g.: She approached us, head half turned; He couldn’t walk far with his leg broken.

1. Elements of poetry.

2. Types of poetry.

Poetry defies an all-encompassing definition. All literature presents experience and there are differences between experiences of poetry and those of other forms of writing, but the differences are mainly degree.

In poetry experience is compressed and intensified. Because of this compression and intensification, poetry possesses greater power than other literature for communicating both experience and abstract concepts. Poetry is the most concentrated form of literature: it makes every moment, every word, every syllable count.

This concentration is what distinguishes poetry from prose, the form of writing that we read in short stories, novels, and newspapers. While prose runs from margin to margin down the page, each line of poetry stops in a particular place because of the poet's desire to create a particular effect. While prose falls into groups of logically linked sentences and paragraphs, poetry is arranged into lines and groups of lines known as stanzas, which are created by patterns of sight and sound as well as by logic. Poetry is also more musical and fanciful than prose: where prose recreates the familiar rhythms of everyday speech, poetry gives words unaccustomed wings.

A poem simultaneously stirs our senses and makes us think. It can make our inner ears hum with its sound effects. Its sensory images dazzle our imagination with sights, aromas, tastes, and textures. Figures of speech may lift the poem above literal fact to an imaginative plane where connections between seemingly unrelated things suddenly become plausible. These sound effects, images, and figures of speech can in turn touch our emotions and make us see the world as the poet wants us to see it—of only for a moment.

Studying poetry should examine the various formal elements that create meaning in a poem — the poem’s speaker, sounds, imagery, and figurative language, and should see how these elements come together to create the poem’s total effect — that special combination of delight and wisdom that we experience in seeing the world transformed, however fleetingly.

Every poem has a speaker, or voice, that addresses us. That speaker may be the poet or may be a character whom the poet has invented. Sometimes the speaker may even be an animal or an inanimate object. We should therefore put together a mental image of the speaker whenever we read a poem. The words of a poem tell us a great deal about the speaker. They often tell us whether the speaker is male or female, young or old, sophisticated or naive. Above all, the words of speaker communicate a special tone, or attitude toward the subject and audience of the poem. The words of the poem express the feelings of the speaker about what is happening in the poem, whether they are feelings of excitement, grief, amusement, confusion or a combination of several emotions.

Poets are particularly sensitive to the sounds of language. The sound of a poem intensifies and often creates its meaning. Poets have a number of sound effects at their disposal:

Rhyme — the repetition of the vowel and consonant sounds at the end of words. But not all poetry is rhymed. Unrhymed iambic pentameter lines, called ”blank verse”, are used by many poets, too.

Alliteration — the repetition of the same consonant sound in several words close together in a sentence or in a line.

Assonance — the repetition of the same or similar vowel sound within words.

Onomatopoeia —vocal imitation: swish, crack, pop.

Rhythm and meter. In a poem the rhythm is the pattern of beats created by the syllables and stresses of the words in each line. Rhythm in poetry can be measured. It is measured in feet. Each foot contains a determined number of stressed and unstressed syllables. Six kinds of feet are common to English verse:

1. the iambic foot or iamb;

2. the trochair foot or trochee;

3. the dactylic foot or dactyl;

4. the anapestic foot or anapest;

5. the spondaic foot or spondee;

6. the perrhic foot or pyrric.

Free verse – is poetry that does not follow a regular, predictable pattern of rhythm, line length, or rhyme.

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