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Poetry Education Thread / The Eagle 2017-09-12 03:12:02 Post No.
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Poetry Education Thread / The Eagle 2017-09-12 03:12:02 Post No.
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Very few people on /lit/ seem to understand poetry. Most don't know what it is, thinking it's little more than prose broken into lines and maybe a little more attention on how the words sound. You are wrong. Poetry is about condensed meaning, and as such it is superior to prose. A novel will take hundreds and hundreds of meandering pages and incorporate dozens of characters to convey a theme. A poem, when done well, conveys the same theme in only a few lines. Characters are not necessarily. Settings are not necessary. Plots are not necessary.
We're going to look at a short yet meaningful poem first. This is "The Eagle," by Alfred Tennsyon, First Baron Tennyson.
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
Now, the most obvious feature of this poem is the rhyme. Each line in the two stanzas has end rhyme. But we want more than that, more than recognition of poetic devices and features. Think about the effect this produces. For one, it gives a sense of unity to those stanzas, which is heightened by the (fairly) regular meter. Let's consider that meter more closely. Most lines seem to be iambic pentameter. And yet, like all good poets, Tennyson changed this meter subtly to produce meaning. It is not enough to follow a meter (or rhyme scheme, or any poetic device), you must also vary your usage in order to evoke meaning. Lines 2 and 3 exhibit trochaic substitution- their initial feet begin with a stress instead of a slack. How does this effect meaning? For one, it binds these words together. The eagle is close to the Sun, but he is still ring'd in by the azure world. What connection can we draw? Perhaps the eagle's very proximity to the Sun is what keeps him ring'd in. Or, venturing into some deeper meaning, consider the mythology around eagles in Western culture. They are the kings of birds. Perhaps Tennyson means that, however noble and close to the heavens such a creature is, it is nonetheless bound by the world, a representation of its 'creatureliness.'
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>>10012086
>Very few people on /lit/ seem to understand poetry.
>Puts a bunch of words someone without a background in poetry could never understand in his post.
Nice "education" thread, OP.
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>>10012086
>Trying to educate /lit/
Good luck
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>>10012086
you might wanna' start explaining exactly what iambs are. I'm barely entry level into poetry right now but I went years without realizing that the stress on syllables mattered. I think it's safe to say starting from the very bottom is best here.
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Meter fucks me up every time. I can never tell whether I'm figuring it out wrong or if the author just meant to deviate in that specific line. Since you mention iambic pentameter, here's how I try to figure out the first line:
u / u / u / u /
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Looks more like tetrameter to me in the way I read it. I know I didn't do anything to the last syllables in "clasps," but the way it sounds in my head it doesn't sound like it should be included at all.
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>>10012254
Jesus Christ, sorry for all these shitty posts.
u..../.........u..../......u....../......u.../
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
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>>10012136
An iamb is a type of metrical foot. Think of feet as the building blocks of poetry (poetry that uses them, at least), each one either two or three syllables. Iambs are feet that start with an unstressed syllable (a slack )and then have a stressed one (a stress). Think "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day." In this example:
He clasps | the crag | with crook- | -ed hands
is divided into its iambs. This gives the line a kind of unity and flow that is pleasing to hear or read. More importantly, it allows for variation. If you read several lines of iambic verse, then a different kind of meter will stand out. When you notice this difference, you can start thinking about why the poet might have chosen to vary the meter there, and what meaning you can draw from it. Trochaic substitution is one example of this kind of variation. A trochee is the opposite of an iamb, with a stress and then a slack:
Close to | the sun | in lone- | -ly lands
begins with a trochee, but the other three feet are iambs. This change draws attention to "close to," but it might do any number of other things. Poetry is all about connecting sonic qualities to meaning. For example, trochaic substitution gives us two slacks in a row. We tend to read slacks quicker than stresses, so we might hurry through "to the." I'm not sure if that property has any significance here, but it might in another poem.
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>>10012245
>>10012259
Damn you're right, meant to write tetrameter, not pentameter.
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>>10012125
>>10012086
Just sing it like a song.
close TO the SUN in LOnely LANds
RING'D with the AZure WORld, he STANds
OP, you've got didactic. Nobody learns by reading technical terms from grammar books, you learn those after you already know how to read poetry.
The key to understanding the intricate rhythmic aspects of verse is being able to listen to the text. Try to think of the punctuation, spacing, breaks, etc not as denoting meaning but denoting a melody, and think of the words and its syllables the same way.
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>>10012386
Should be LONEly, not LOnely, but it's an abstraction regardless.
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>>10012125
>tries to explain poetry
>doesn't understand poetry
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File: Alfred, Lord Tennyson 00.jpg (763KB, 1000x1309px)
763KB, 1000x1309px
I think you're going about this a bit too rigidly.
I consider meter less important, and less accessible, as a means to unravel the meaning of verse than symbol, for several reasons - I'll name the chief of these.
A poem is meant to be read - and felt. If one is reading a poem, you are meant to feel the flow of it's verse. This is highly intuitive, not analytical. The analysis of formal metrical structures is the pastime of poets and students of poetry, but it is not the natural way of reading a poem.
Also, a change in meter does not "produce" meaning, nor does it "evoke" meaning. Rather the poet's intention is to bring the reader into a sort of rhythmic trance, wherein he may weave his imaginations, and by breaking that rhythm, call attention to the moment of it's breaking within the lines of verse; however, the meaning lies, not in the broken rhythm, but in the symbolic prose of the poem.
That said, there are poets and times when a broken rhythm is itself a symbol.
It may be more helpful to demonstrate the means of an analysis of symbolic imagery of poems - beginning with this, indeed simple, piece of poetry.
Should this thread remain, I would love to contribute. At present, I must say good night.
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