Poetic Concepts
Sound devices
All sound devices are interesting because they bring together words that sound alike but do not necessarily have anything else in common. In "Fire and Ice" the two words in the title are opposite in meaning but have the same vowel sound (assonance). The poem, which at times suggests that the two are the same in a much as both can "end" the world, would be much less effective if the words lacked this assonance. This is why poetry is so difficult to translate.
Alliteration: repetition of the initial sounds (usually consonants) of stressed syllables in nearby words or lines, usually at word beginnings.
From Lord Tennyson's "Break, Break, Break":
And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill.
From Lord Byron's "She Walks in Beauty":
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
Assonance: the relatively close succession of the same or similar vowel sounds, but with different consonants: a kind of vowel rhyme.
From William Carol Williams' "The Red Wheelbarrow"
Glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
Imagery: the words a poet uses to evoke images that the reader "sees" (or hears, smells, tastes, touches) because they describe what the senses can "sense. (Sights, sounds, smells, flavors, textures etc.)
Notice how in the third stanza of "Break, Break, Break" Lord Tennyson uses three kinds of image:
And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill;
But O for the touch of a vanish'd hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!
Metaphor: a figure of speech in which a word or phrase describing one thing is transferred to something entirely different. Metaphors can be looked at as a kind of "condensed simile", a comparison without the use of "like" or "as." In the following example from Robert Frost's "Hyla Brook" the bed/sheet metaphor describes the brook as it looks to the poet when it has dried out.
Its bed is left a faded paper sheet
Of dead leaves stuck together by the heat.
Part of the aptness of this metaphor is that "bed" in itself can have two meanings (stream bed - bed to sleep upon) and is a kind of pun. The second line is effective because faded paper sheet (the metaphor), which sounds as if it has a romantic-wistful potential, is brought to earth.
Robert Herrick in "To Virgins, Making Much of Time" continues the metaphoric image of "time flying" in the second stanza of the poem:
The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,
The higher he's a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
And nearer he's to setting.
Calling the sun "The glorious lamp of heaven" is metaphoric; notice Herrick "mixes" his metaphor when he predicts the sun's "race" will be run. This metaphor is an example of personification.
In the second stanza of William Blake's "The Poison Tree" there are metaphors within metaphors.
And I watered it in fears
Night and morning with my tears,
And I sunned it with smiles
And with soft deceitful wiles.
"It" is his "wrath" (anger) from the previous stanza. From the poems title we know that the symbol for (and a metaphor of) his wrath is "The Poison Tree." Watering wrath in "fears" is a metaphor; watering the tree (already a metaphor) with "tears" is a type of exaggeration or hyperbole. Sunning wrath both extends the tree metaphor, and introduces a new metaphor smiles before ending with "soft deceitful wiles" which parallels the "fears" of the first line. For a poem that looks on the surface to be almost childlike in its simplicity, "The Poison Tree" seems to have more than its share of intricacies.
Some modern poets like William Carlos Williams seem to want to see things as they are detached, as it were, from extraneous meanings. Poems like "The Red Wheelbarrow" avoid metaphor and are distorted when read metaphorically. Sometimes a red wheelbarrow is just a red wheelbarrow.
Onomatopoeia: any word whose sound echoes its meaning.
In "The Oven Bird" Robert Frost uses the word loud onomatopoetically.
There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird.
Frost emphasizes the loudness of "loud" by placing it alone at the beginning of the line ñ the only line in the poem that starts with an accented (stressed) syllable. (See iambic pentameter)
Personification: a type of metaphor in which distinctive human characteristics are given to an animal, object or idea.
From Philip Larkin's "Coming":
On longer evenings,
Light, shill and yellow,
Bathes the serene
Foreheads of houses
Rhyme occurs when the last vowel and consonant sounds of two words are identical. In Robert Frost's "Fire and Ice" fire rhymes with desire; ice with twice and suffice; hate with great. Generally speaking, Rhyme refers to rhymes at the end of the line. Other rhymes are called "internal rhymes." Sometimes rhymes are only approximate. These are called near or slant rhymes.
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice, 5
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Emily Dickinson often employs near rhyme as in the second stanza of "When Night is almost Done."
I never spoke with God,
Nor visited in heaven;
Yet certain am I of the spot
As if the chart were given.
Rhyme scheme: The pattern established by the arrangement of rhymes in a stanza or poem, generally described by using letters of the alphabet to denote the recurrence of rhyming lines:
Some say the world will end in fire, a
Some say in ice. b
From what I've tasted of desire a
I hold with those who favor fire. a
But if it had to perish twice, b
I think I know enough of hate c
To know that for destruction ice b
Is also great c
And would suffice b
Simile: a figure of speech in which an explicit comparison is made between two essentially unlike things, usually using like, as or than:
Lord Byron's "She Walks in Beauty" begins with a simile.
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies.
As does William Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud":
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills.
Note how these similes expand upon the initial image.
From Robert Frost's "Hyla Brook":
... the Hyla breed
That shouted in the mist a month ago,
Like ghosts of sleigh-bells in a ghost of snow.
Stanza: the poetic version of a paragraph, a division of a poem made by arranging the lines into units separated by a space; traditionally poetic stanza are similar in length to one another and similar in rhyme scheme.
Archibald MacLeish's "Ars poetica" begins with four similes:
A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,
Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,
Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown--
A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.
After several more similes, MacLeish ends his poem with four couplets that do not contain a simile.
All sound devices are interesting because they bring together words that sound alike but do not necessarily have anything else in common. In "Fire and Ice" the two words in the title are opposite in meaning but have the same vowel sound (assonance). The poem, which at times suggests that the two are the same in a much as both can "end" the world, would be much less effective if the words lacked this assonance. This is why poetry is so difficult to translate.
Alliteration: repetition of the initial sounds (usually consonants) of stressed syllables in nearby words or lines, usually at word beginnings.
From Lord Tennyson's "Break, Break, Break":
And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill.
From Lord Byron's "She Walks in Beauty":
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
Assonance: the relatively close succession of the same or similar vowel sounds, but with different consonants: a kind of vowel rhyme.
From William Carol Williams' "The Red Wheelbarrow"
Glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
Imagery: the words a poet uses to evoke images that the reader "sees" (or hears, smells, tastes, touches) because they describe what the senses can "sense. (Sights, sounds, smells, flavors, textures etc.)
Notice how in the third stanza of "Break, Break, Break" Lord Tennyson uses three kinds of image:
And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill;
But O for the touch of a vanish'd hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!
Metaphor: a figure of speech in which a word or phrase describing one thing is transferred to something entirely different. Metaphors can be looked at as a kind of "condensed simile", a comparison without the use of "like" or "as." In the following example from Robert Frost's "Hyla Brook" the bed/sheet metaphor describes the brook as it looks to the poet when it has dried out.
Its bed is left a faded paper sheet
Of dead leaves stuck together by the heat.
Part of the aptness of this metaphor is that "bed" in itself can have two meanings (stream bed - bed to sleep upon) and is a kind of pun. The second line is effective because faded paper sheet (the metaphor), which sounds as if it has a romantic-wistful potential, is brought to earth.
Robert Herrick in "To Virgins, Making Much of Time" continues the metaphoric image of "time flying" in the second stanza of the poem:
The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,
The higher he's a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
And nearer he's to setting.
Calling the sun "The glorious lamp of heaven" is metaphoric; notice Herrick "mixes" his metaphor when he predicts the sun's "race" will be run. This metaphor is an example of personification.
In the second stanza of William Blake's "The Poison Tree" there are metaphors within metaphors.
And I watered it in fears
Night and morning with my tears,
And I sunned it with smiles
And with soft deceitful wiles.
"It" is his "wrath" (anger) from the previous stanza. From the poems title we know that the symbol for (and a metaphor of) his wrath is "The Poison Tree." Watering wrath in "fears" is a metaphor; watering the tree (already a metaphor) with "tears" is a type of exaggeration or hyperbole. Sunning wrath both extends the tree metaphor, and introduces a new metaphor smiles before ending with "soft deceitful wiles" which parallels the "fears" of the first line. For a poem that looks on the surface to be almost childlike in its simplicity, "The Poison Tree" seems to have more than its share of intricacies.
Some modern poets like William Carlos Williams seem to want to see things as they are detached, as it were, from extraneous meanings. Poems like "The Red Wheelbarrow" avoid metaphor and are distorted when read metaphorically. Sometimes a red wheelbarrow is just a red wheelbarrow.
Onomatopoeia: any word whose sound echoes its meaning.
In "The Oven Bird" Robert Frost uses the word loud onomatopoetically.
There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird.
Frost emphasizes the loudness of "loud" by placing it alone at the beginning of the line ñ the only line in the poem that starts with an accented (stressed) syllable. (See iambic pentameter)
Personification: a type of metaphor in which distinctive human characteristics are given to an animal, object or idea.
From Philip Larkin's "Coming":
On longer evenings,
Light, shill and yellow,
Bathes the serene
Foreheads of houses
Rhyme occurs when the last vowel and consonant sounds of two words are identical. In Robert Frost's "Fire and Ice" fire rhymes with desire; ice with twice and suffice; hate with great. Generally speaking, Rhyme refers to rhymes at the end of the line. Other rhymes are called "internal rhymes." Sometimes rhymes are only approximate. These are called near or slant rhymes.
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice, 5
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Emily Dickinson often employs near rhyme as in the second stanza of "When Night is almost Done."
I never spoke with God,
Nor visited in heaven;
Yet certain am I of the spot
As if the chart were given.
Rhyme scheme: The pattern established by the arrangement of rhymes in a stanza or poem, generally described by using letters of the alphabet to denote the recurrence of rhyming lines:
Some say the world will end in fire, a
Some say in ice. b
From what I've tasted of desire a
I hold with those who favor fire. a
But if it had to perish twice, b
I think I know enough of hate c
To know that for destruction ice b
Is also great c
And would suffice b
Simile: a figure of speech in which an explicit comparison is made between two essentially unlike things, usually using like, as or than:
Lord Byron's "She Walks in Beauty" begins with a simile.
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies.
As does William Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud":
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills.
Note how these similes expand upon the initial image.
From Robert Frost's "Hyla Brook":
... the Hyla breed
That shouted in the mist a month ago,
Like ghosts of sleigh-bells in a ghost of snow.
Stanza: the poetic version of a paragraph, a division of a poem made by arranging the lines into units separated by a space; traditionally poetic stanza are similar in length to one another and similar in rhyme scheme.
Archibald MacLeish's "Ars poetica" begins with four similes:
A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,
Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,
Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown--
A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.
After several more similes, MacLeish ends his poem with four couplets that do not contain a simile.