Some people consider poetry difficult to comprehend and compose by reason of its condensation of language, its rhythmic nature, its dense imagery, and its formalism. Those are the inherent characteristics of poetry that set it apart from other literary genres.
In "Poetry: Diction, Imagery, Rhythm and Form" I focus on the importance of diction (word choice). Poets choose words to create or extend figures of speech, for their sounds, to create or maintain rhythm, to create or extend images, and for formal reasons.
Poets use figurative language to achieve special meanings or effects. Although they are primarily poetic, figures (tropes and schemes) are integral to the functioning of language and indispensable to all modes of discourse.
In contrast with other genres, poetry depends on sound to convey images and emotions. One of your goals as a poet is to discover what sounds your words will make and what effect those sounds will have on the listener/reader. Your diction will either contribute to or detract from the sonic texture of your poem. Poetry is as much an oral tradition as it is a written tradition, and information in a poetic form that has regular rhyme and rhythm will be easier to remember and will aurally affect your audience.
One difference between poetry and music is melody. The melodies that accompany the words enhance the sounds of the words and are essential in the creation of mood. Poetry, however, solely depends on voice--that is, depends on the utterance of a sequence of speech-sounds. How you utter the speech-sounds will determine the poem's meaning. For example, consider the difference in meaning between the following statements.
Why are you complaining? I married you, didn't I?
Why are you complaining? I married you, didn't I?
Obviously, emphasizing different words can change the entire meaning of a poem. As you create a poem, you need to use your ears.
Poets create music by way of rhyme, rhythm and form. I will discuss form later, but at least consider the structure of the first two stanzas of Langston Hughes' "Young Gal's Blues."
I'm gonna walk to the graveyard
'Hind ma friend Miss Cora Lee.
Gonna walk to the graveyard
'Hind ma dear friend Cora Lee
Cause when I'm dead some
Body'll have to walk behind me.
I'm goin' to the po' house
To see ma old Aunt Clew.
Goin' to the po' house
To see ma old Aunt Clew.
When I'm old an' ugly
I'll want to see somebody, too.*
Although the blues began exclusively as a musical form, poets have been using the structure as a poetic form. Melodies do not accompany Hughes' poem, but the content and form imply blues. One can recite or sing his poem. The first two lines of each stanza state the situation; the third and fourth lines repeat the situation; the last two lines either comment on the first two lines or conclude the first two lines.
How is it possible to create music simply from words? Poets are sensitive to the words they hear, to the sounds words make. The combination of consonants and vowels in certain ways--alliteration, consonance, assonance, repetition--can communicate emotions that are distinct from the words' denotations and/or connotations. However, sound does not necessarily exist separate from meaning. Sometimes sound is equivalent to meaning. Words that suggest their meanings via the sounds they make--chunk and sleazy, for examples--are mimetic, and words that imitate their meanings via the sounds they make--swish and zip, for examples--are onomatopoetic. Too much alliteration, consonance, et cetera either will irritate or amuse your audience, so be aware of the effects your techniques will have on your audience. In other words, try to infuse your techniques naturally into your poem in ways that do not bring undue attention to them.
Another element of sound poets utilize is rhyme, two or more words with the same sound. Although end rhyme (at the end of lines) is the most well-known pattern, anaphora (at the beginning of lines) and internal rhyme (within a line or lines) are important techniques to consider when creating a poem. A poet does not make a word rhyme for rhyme alone. Rather, similar to other poetic devices, rhyme is a technique that a poet uses to create an effect, such as altering the tone of a poem.
Rather than true rhyme--wood and good, for example--you may want to experiment with eye rhyme--cough and though--or slant rhyme--body and bloody. You also may want to experiment with punctuation. End-stops (punctuation at the end of lines) cause the reader to pause and to stress the words at the end of such lines. The technique can create a sing-song rhythm, a rhythm many nursery rhymes have. Remember, you want to guide your audience to meaning not only through content but also through technique, so be certain of the rhetorical effect(s) you want to accomplish as you manipulate sound.
Punctuation marks--and lack of them--influence a poem's cadence, or pace. A general rule is that the more punctuation, the slower your audience will read the poem. Enjambment occurs where there is no punctuation at the end of a line or when the idea in one line continues in the next. Because enjambment encourages a reader to move to the next line without pausing, using it will lessen a regular end-rhyme pattern or a sing-song effect. Caesuras (punctuation within lines) cause a reader to pause or to stop in the middle of lines, slowing the pace of the poem or providing clear breaks in thought.
Rhythm is a result of cadence, of the natural pattern of sounds of words. An analogy is that the rhythm or meter of a poem is similar to the drumbeat of a song. Think also about instruments that establish sound and rhythm at the same time. A rhythm guitarist creates sound with one hand as he/she fingers the chords and strokes the strings with the other hand in a rhythmical pattern, fast or slow, in time with the music. In that way he/she creates sound and rhythm simultaneously, not separately. When you write a poem, you create sound and rhythm simultaneously. I introduced sound first because, if you are learning to play guitar, you need to study the configurations of chords before you experiment with strokes, until you are able to play a song as a whole.
Everyday conversation also has a cadence. Some poets use the cadence of natural patterns of speech as the rhythm of their poetry. Walt Whitman, the originator of free verse in the United States, utilized such patterns in his poems. Poets who write in free verse do not use strict metrical patterns to determine units of measure. One way they measure rhythm is through lines and stanzas. They unify the ideas they present by employing a wide range of figures of speech.
Some forms of poetry, however, have a specific rhythmic pattern. Contemporary verse is accentual-syllabic because the metrical units contain a set number of accents (stresses) as well as a set number of syllables in each line. When you examine a poem for meter, mark the accented and unaccented syllables and words, looking for patterns and breaks in those patterns. That process is scansion. You want to train your ear just as a musician trains his/her ear. After you sensitize yourself to rhythm and meter, you will become more adept, and you will be able to analyze your poems better.
The basic unit of measure is the foot: iamb, trochee, anapest, dactyl and spondee. A line of two feet is dimeter; three feet, trimeter; four feet, tetrameter; five feet, pentameter; six feet, hexameter; seven feet, heptameter; and eight feet, octameter. Scansion is an inexact science, and different scholars have different methods of scanning a poem. Your scan of a poem may differ from another reader's scan. Scansion is a tool for measuring rhythm and cadence, not an end to itself. Another step you may want to complete is to read the poem for meaning, perhaps underlining or bracketing the words you naturally stress. Actors do such as they read a script because emphasizing different words can change the entire meaning of a work.
Deviations from the prevalent meter call attention to themselves and alter the pace at which the poem is read, either quickening or slowing the metrical pattern. For example, the more accented syllables, in or out of sequence, a poem has, the slower the reader will proceed. As you explore rhythm in your poetry, you may want to consider music as a resource. Although many songs you hear utilize regular rhythms, many poets use blues and jazz rhythms as patterns for poems. Jazz and poetry have many similarities, but different rules govern each.
(For more information on the aforementioned techniques, you may want to peruse this post.)
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*Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel, eds., The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes
(New York: Knopf, 1996) 123.
