The Fundamental Structures

of Poetry
The Fundamental Structures
of Poetry
The Fundamental Structures
of Poetry
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 dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
I shall forget you presently, my dear,
So make the most of this, your little day,
Your little month, your little half a year,
Ere I forget, or die, or move away,
And we are done forever; by and by
I shall forget you, as I said, but now,
If you entreat me with your loveliest lie
I will protest you with my favorite vow.
I would indeed that love were longer-lived,
And vows were not so brittle as they are,
But so it is, and nature has contrived
To struggle on without a break thus far, —
Whether or not we find what we are seeking
Is idle, biologically speaking.
The Fundamental Sounds
of Poetry
 Lose Yourself

His palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are

There’s vomit on his sweater , mom’s

The King Never Dies

I complain the game, I and I , its’ a love-

hate
But I found that I can move a of
Even when you…are me , and I appear to be
down for the
Only time I ever been and is
Driving around with my…whereabouts in
 Shall I, Wasting in Despair (excerpt)

Shall I, wasting in despair,

Die because a woman’s fair?
Or my cheeks make pale with care
’Cause another’s rosy are?
Be she fairer than the day
Or the flowery meads in May—
If she be not so to me
What care I how fair she be?
Shall my foolish heart be pined
’Cause I see a woman kind;
Or a well disposéd nature
Joined with a lovely feature?
Be she meeker, kinder, than
Turtle-dove or pelican,
If she be not so to me
What care I how kind she be?
 I Sing the Body Electric (excerpt)

I sing the body electric,

The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth
them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to
them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the
charge of the soul.

Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own

bodies conceal themselves?
And if those who defile the living are as bad as they
who defile the dead?
And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul?
And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?
It was many and many a year ,
In a kingdom by the ,
That a maiden there lived whom you may

By the name of Annabel ;

And this maiden she lived with no other

Than to love and be loved by me.

The Fundamental Feelings
of Poetry

towards the poem’s

speaker, reader, ,
and/or subject created by the poet
matter. for the reader.
This is interpreted
by the reader.
Tone & Mood:

When young, I’d not enjoyed the

common pleasures,
My natures’ basic love was for the
hills.
Mistakenly I fell into the worldly
net,
And thus remained for thirteen
years.
A bird once caged must yearn for
its old forest.
A fish in a pond will long to return
to the lake.
So now I want to head to southern
lands,
Returning to my fields and
orchards there.
I, too, sing American.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow, I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.
Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—
I, too, am America.
 The Fundamental Images
of Poetry

, such as
metaphors, similes, and allusions,

However, inn poetry,

, such line length
and line placement, and through the use of
, or sounds and rhyme schemes
that appeal to one’s hearing.
The carriage waits at the door. It
is now midday.
The autumn sun is getting more
and more intense.
Midday gusts waft the dust
across the deserted village.
An old beggar woman has
spread her rags beneath the
shade of the banyan tree in tired
slumber.
On all sides stretches a sun-
flooded night void of speech or
sound or sign of life.
Only in my house there is no
trace of rest or sleep.
A free bird leaps
On the back of the wind .The caged bird sings
and floats downstream with a fearful trill
till the current ends of things unknown
and dips his wings but longed for still
in the orange sun rays and his tune is heard
and dares to claim the sky
on the distant hill
But a bird that stalks for the caged bird
down his narrow cage sings of freedom.
can seldom see through
his bars of rage
his wings are clipped and
his feet are tired
so he opens his throat to sing.
All day
its dark, slick bronze soaks
in a mossy place,
its teeth,
a multitude
set
for the comedy
that never comes –
its tail
knobbed and shiny,
and with a heavy-weight’s punch
packed around the bone.
In beautiful Florida
he is king
of his own part
of the black river,
and from his nap
he will wake
into the warm darkness
to boom, and thrust forward,
paralyzing
the swift, thin-waisted fish,
or the bird
in its frilled, white gown,
that has dipped down
from the heaven of leaves
one last time,
to drink.
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my hear there sirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.

Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,

Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more
 The Fundamental Types
of Poetry
There are at least 14 common types of poems:
• Blank Verse • Sonnet
• Rhymed Poem • Elegy
• Free Verse • Ode
• Epic • Limerick
• Narrative • Lyric
• Haiku • Ballad
• Pastoral • Villanelle
• Almost always in iambi pentameter, • Obviously rhymes
or lines of writing that consist of ten • Vary in rhyme scheme by group:
syllables in a specific pattern of • Couplets: 2 rhyming lines
unstressed syllables followed by a • Quatrain: 4 alternating rhyming
stressed syllable lines
• Does NOT rhyme • Tercet: 3 rhyming lines

Well Known Poets Well Known Poets

• William Shakespeare • Robert Frost
• Christopher Marlowe • Maya Angelou
• John Milton • Pablo Neruda
• No consistent rhyme scheme, • Long narrative works
pattern or musical form • Details extraordinary feats and
• LOTS OF FREEDOM adventures
• About the distant past
Well Known Poets
Well Known Poets
• Gustave Kahn
• Walt Whitman (The originator) • Homer – The Iliad & The Odyssey
• T. E. Hulme • Ezra Pound - The Cantos
• Valmiki - Ramayana
• Similar to an epic • From Japan
• Tells a story • Tend to explore nature
• 3 lines based on syllable count:
Well Known Poets • Line 1: 5 syllables
• Line 2: 7 syllables
• Geoffrey Chaucer
• Line 3: 5 syllables
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Well Known Poets
• Matsuo Basho
• Natsume Soseki
• Nakamura Kusatao
• Concerned with the natural world, • 14 lined poem
rural life, and landscapes • Petrarchan Sonnet: Octave (ABBA
• Goes as far back as Ancient Greece ABBA) & Sestet (CDE CDE or CDC
and Rome to present day CDC)
• Shakespearean Sonnet: 3 Quatrains
(ABAB CDCD EFEF) & 1 Couplet (GG)
Well Known Poets • Normally, but not always, about love
• Hesiod
• Virgil Well Known Poets
• Gary Snyder
• Francesco Petrarch
• William Shakespeare
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning
• Concerned with death or loss • A tribute to the subject of the poem
• Explores mourning, loss, reflection, • Very similar to an elegy, but does not
redemption, and consolation have to be sad

Well Known Poets Well Known Poets

• Lord Tennyson • John Keats
• Christina Rossetti • William Wordsworth
• Douglas Dunn • Allen Tate
• 5 line poem with a 1 stanza (AABBA) • Feelings and emotion are the main
• Short, pithy, or descriptive subject focus
• Often comedic, trivial, or crude • Very broad by similar to epic and
dramatic poetry
Well Known Poets
Well Known Poets
• Edward Lear
• Dixon Lanier Merritt • Emily Dickinson
• Mark Twain • Sir Thomas Wyatt
• W. H. Auden
• Narrative poem of rhymed, melodic • 19 line poem of 5 tercets and a
quatrains quatrain
• Can be poetic or musical • Highly specific internal rhyme scheme
• Describes obsessions and other intense
Well Known Poets matters
• John Keats Well Known Poets
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• Bob Dylan • William Ernest Henley
• Sylvia Plath
• Dylan Thomas
The great poems of
our elders in many
tongues we struggled
to comprehend who
are now content with
mystery simple

Logic, trope, scheme, theme, structure, all that stuff

I met them, matched them, made them call my bluff;
We thrashed it out, rehashed it forty ways;
Strutting that little scene, I played for praise
And won my share—oh yes, I had enough