Poetry is a mystery

For many, poetry is a mystery, something strange, difficult and, above all, intimidating. Even those who love novels and short stories often avoid it, feeling that, somehow, they should first have been initiated. It needn't be this way. Poetry can be a difficult and refined art of course, but it is also more primitive, basic, and natural than prose. 

So what exactly is poetry? This is best answered by contrasting poetry with prose. In a general sense, to write prose (as the word "prosaic" suggests) is to use language in a direct, straightforward, unrefined manner, while to write poetry is to use it in an allusive, refined, and beautiful one. Such a definition is far from satisfactory, however; prose can be exquisitely refined and beautiful, just as poetry can be harsh and abrasive (for example, read Ted Hughes or World War I poets such as Siegfried Sassoon).

Meter

Poetry is better defined as metrical writing. Meter, from the Greek word for "measure," is a way of arranging lines of poetry into a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables to achieve rhythm. Novelists do not do this. 

To understand meter, you must first understand what a syllable is. Every word contains one or more syllables. For example, the word "cat" has one syllable, one unit of pronunciation. The word "deny" has two syllables, "de" and "ny," while "excitement" can be divided into three syllables, "American" into four, and so on. Now pick up a newspaper and read a sentence out loud. As you do, notice the way you place more emphasis on one word or syllable than another. The same is true of day-to-day speech. If you were to arrive late at work and exclaim to a colleague, "the traffic gets worse every day," you might place greatest emphasis on the first syllable of the word "every."

The basic metrical unit is the foot, known as the "metrical foot." Poets disagree about the number and nature of these metrical feet, but in general it is accepted that about nine exist. These are:

- the iamb (one stressed syllable followed by an unstressed) 

- the pyrrhic (two unstressed syllables, often prepositions)

- the spondee (two stressed syllables) 

- the trochee (known as the reverse iamb, composed of a stressed followed by an unstressed syllable)

- the anapaest (two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable) 

- the dactyl (one stressed syllable, followed by two unstressed)

- the amphibrach (one unstressed syllable, followed by one stressed, then another unstressed) 

- the cretic (stressed, unstressed, stressed) 

- the molossus (three stressed) 

The most popular of these is undoubtedly the iamb. To get a feeling for the iambic beat, read the following line out loud several times: "we sang the day away." This line is composed of 3 iambic feet, beating out a da dum, da dum, da dum rhythm.

The Line

Once the poet has mastered the different metrical feet, he will attempt to arrange them into lines. The line is to poetry what the sentence is to prose. A line with just 1 foot is known as monometer, 2 feet as dimeter, 3 as trimeter, 4 as tetrameter, 5 as pentameter, 6 as hexameter, 7 as heptameter, and 8 as octameter.

By far the most common line in English poetry is iambic pentameter, made up of 5 iambic feet. It is the standard meter of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare's plays, Milton's Paradise Lost, and Wordsworth's poetry, along with countless other works. Here is an example by the English poet John Betjeman: "What pleasure as the oil lamp sparkled gold." An example of a different meter, anapaestic tetrameter (4 feet, each with two unstressed syllables, followed by one stressed), is provided by the English aristocrat Lord Byron: "And the shean on their spears was like stars on the sea."

However, no poet writes poems composed of line after line of perfect iambic pentameter, or of any other meter. If he did, the poem would become so monotonous it would be unreadable. Many lines of poetry contain mixed meter. They will commonly have 4 iambic feet plus a pyrrhic, trochee, or spondee. Take the most famous line in all English literature: "To be or not to be: that is the question." Here, Shakespeare begins with 3 iambic feet, then a pause (known as a caesura), followed by a trochee, "that is," and an amphibrach, "the question."

Enjambment and End-Stopping

To avoid monotony, poets not only vary the metrical feet in their lines, they also vary the endings. Sometimes, the sense, meaning, or rhythm of a line carries on to the next one. This is known as enjambment. Take these opening lines to a poem by the 17th century English poet John Donne:

"Batter my heart three-personed God, for you 

as yet but knock, breathe, shine and seek to mend."

Here, the first line carries over into the second. Note also that the dominant meter, or beat, is iambic pentameter. However, the first foot of the first line is trochaic (one stressed syllable, followed by one unstressed syllable), and the third foot of the second line is a spondee (two stressed syllables). With this in mind, try reading the lines aloud several times, noticing how Donne achieves a particular rhythm through the arrangement of his stressed and unstressed syllables and his use of enjambment.

The opposite of enjambment is known as end-stopping. An end-stopped line is one in which the sense and meter of the line ends with the line and does not carry on to the next. Not all end-stopped lines close with a period, by the way. Take this example from Milton:

"Their wand'ring course now high, now low, then hid 

Progressive, retrograde or standing still."

Here, the first line ends without a punctuation mark, and yet it is end-stopped. 

Thus you begin to see how poets control the speed and rhythm of their lines. It should also be said that this rhythm often reflects the meaning. In other words, if a poet is attempting to describe anger and pain, the rhythm may well be jerky and rough. A poet describing the sight of his sleeping child, however, would use a different meter, one smooth and gentle, to reflect the tender scene.

Sound

But what about the sound? Of course, this is a major concern for the poet. He may be in complete control of his line, but if the words themselves clash together in an ugly, jarring way, the poem will be a failure. Consonants can be grouped according to the effect they have:

- Plosives, known for their thrusting, explosive effect, such as "p," "t," "k," "b," and "d"

- Fricatives, "f," "th," and "ph," which create a slightly unpleasant sound 

- Gutturals, such as "g" and "k" (German is often referred to as a guttural language because of the many "ich," "ak," and "ukk" sounds)

- Liquids, usually "l" and "r," known for their smooth effect 

- Nasals create a humming sound and are formed from the letters "m" and "n"

- Sibilant sounds are created by the letter "s" 

When several words in a line begin with the same consonant sound, this is known as alliteration. A good example of this is provided by Betjeman in his verse autobiography Summoned by Bells: "There after supper lit by lantern light." When similar consonant sounds appear within a series of words, this is known as consonance: "Betty bought a little bit of butter."

Then there are the vowel sounds. Poets often use the same vowel sounds to create a particular effect. So, for example, Lord Tennyson, attempting to create a drowsy, soporific, hypnotic effect in his poem The Lotus Eaters, repeats long "o" and "e" sounds: 

"All day the wind breathes low with mellower tone:

Thro' every hollow cave and valley lone. ..." 

This poem, based upon an incident in

Homer's Odyssey

in which Odysseus' crew encounter  people who spend their days in a drugged haze, shows how the form of the poem, whether through meter or sound, reflects the content or theme.

The Stanza

The metrical feet are arranged into lines, and the lines are arranged into stanzas. How many lines a stanza contains is up to the poet. The most common stanza is the so-called "quatrain," composed of four lines. The number of lines can run into double figures, although more than 12 are unusual. Some poems are made up of several stanzas with the same number of lines; others vary their stanza length. The Petrachan sonnet, for example, opens with an eight-line stanza, followed by a six-line one; the Shakespearean sonnet is made up of three quatrains and a couplet.

There is vastly more to poetry than a single Steemit Post  can cover; books on poetic structure and technique can run to hundreds of pages. But once you grasp the basics, you will at least have made a start.

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