The Everything Writing Poetry Book (16 page)
Imagery
To get an idea of how imagery works in poetry, consider your own face in a mirror. You may see the shape of your head, the fall of your hair, the tone of your skin, the color of your eyes, and so on. But remember that the image you see in the mirror is a reflection; you are actually seeing yourself backwards, and not as others see you. The quality of the glass in the mirror and its reflective materials will also affect the image you see. Distortions of light, shape, and dimension will occur no matter how close or far away you hold the mirror.
Writing poetry is like holding up a mirror to what you sense, remember, dream, or think; your poems are reflections of all those things, not the things themselves. However, the images you create in your poetry can be very powerful, and many lyric poems derive their meaning from a strong image placed directly in their center. William Blake's poem “The Tyger” is an effort to solve the mystery of that fierce animal's dreadful power. The tiger is obviously the central image, and the poet explores each feature of the tiger's body asking what greater being could have created such a beast. In addition to the imagery notice the meter and the rhyme, which reinforce the poem's message.
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears,
And water'd heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
As an exercise, you might try to focus on a similar imageâone that instills fear or awe in youâas the subject of a poem. You'll notice that Blake proposes several questions in this poem. This is a great way to explore a subject. In your poem, you might consider using this method. Even if you don't come up with the answers to your questions, it might be a more exciting way to present the subject matter.
William Blake (1757â1827) was a forerunner of the Romantic school of poetry begun by William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge. His longer verses conceive an entire mythology of spirits and forces centered around the island of Albion. He was an accomplished artist, too, creating pictures for many of his lyrics.
Emotion
Lyrics based upon emotions can take readers through a wide range of human experiences. However, emotions can be even more difficult to evoke in poetry than images. Your reader must be able to recognize and feel the emotion using the small pieces of information offered by your words. A reader will not feel the exact same emotion you did when you began writing, but he will probably be able to sympathize with you by recalling a similar personal experience or feeling.
“On My First Son” by Ben Jonson is a strong example of emotion being the center of a lyric poem. In essence, the poem is a tender goodbye from a father who has lost his son. In the first line, Jonson uses the phrase “child of my right hand”âthe translation of the Hebrew name Benjamin (his own and his son's name), to give final recognition to the relationship they shared.
Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;
My sin was too much hope of thee, lov'd boy:
Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
1
Oh could I lose all father now! For why
Will man lament the state he should env'y
To have so soon 'scaped world's and flesh's rage,
And, if no other misery, yet age?
Rest in soft peace, and asked, say, “Here doth lie
Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry”
For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such
As what he loves may never like too much
.
1
That is, on the anniversary of the very day he was born
Ben Jonson (1573â1637), like his contemporary William Shakespeare, was a poet and a playwright. His most famous play is
Volpone
, about a man who tricks his friends out of money and gifts. In 1619, Jonson was made the first poet laureate of England. Though Shakespeare is more widely recognized, his and Jonson's works share many similarities.
Jonson's poem is so compelling, in part, due to the extreme sadness of the subject matter. However, a poem doesn't have to focus on such strong material to effectively portray emotion. If you want to write a poem about a shattered dish or a dark storm cloud, you can still make it forceful and engaging. As long as you describe your feelings to your reader in great detail, the emotion will come through.
Argument
If you took a composition course in college, you may remember that an argument is a stance taken on an issue, with concrete details marshaled to support that stance. Many poems are written with this idea in mindâthe speaker takes a stance on an issue and attempts to sway the reader, or a listener within the poem, toward his or her point of view.
A famous example of such a lyric is found in Robert Herrick's poem “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time.” In the poem, the speaker exhorts his listener to “go marry” and “be not coy” when she is young, for there is plenty of time for tarrying when one is old. Herrick sets out his argument in the first stanza of the poem, following:
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may:
    Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today,
    Tomorrow will be dying
.
The poetic form can help persuade your reader even further. While Herrick's poem will not convince all readers, the rhythm of the words and the rhyme he uses strengthens the argument. Even if you don't agree with his opinion on the subject, it's difficult not to be impressed by his skill. Try this method in your own poetry and see what responses you receive.
Present an argument within a poem of your own. To do this, you must select a controversial issue and support one side of it. You may choose to argue that both genders are equally intelligent, that dogs are better than cats, or that spring is a superior season to winter. Whatever your argument, be sure to support your claims thoroughly.
Open Form
An open-form poem is exactly what it sounds like. You can choose to use or not to use rhyme. You may follow a strict meter or vary your patterns to create different effects. Line breaks are not regulated by a certain number of feet or syllables, and the numbers of lines in a stanza, if you choose to use stanzas at all, can vary to suit your vision for the poem. The open form also allows you to move the lines around on the page. You can be creative with a poem's appearance, and even give it a certain shape on the paper. To help you understand open-form poetry, you may want to consider its most widespread form,
free verse
.
Elements of Free Verse
Though some free verse may look like prose, it actually carries more weight per word, due to compressed language. Using compressed language is a means of making fewer words do more. You can use several strategies and tools to create compressed language. Some of these include denotative and connotative meanings, figures of speech, symbolism, the repetition of key words, structures, images, and ideas, the altering of syntax, and the omission of words such as conjunctions, articles, and prepositions.
The aesthetics of a poemâthe way it looks on a pageâwill also have an immediate effect upon a reader. You should thus be aware of the length of the lines, the line breaks and indentations (if any), the stanza breaks (if any), and the size of the page upon which the poem will appear. Some poets even choose to have the shape of a poem mimic a recognizable image, like a flower or a house, depending on the subject matter.
In free verse, poets must rely more strongly on language to move the energy of a poem from line to line. Ending lines with stressed syllables will help to create the energy you need to move your readers through your poem. Generally speaking, nouns and action verbs will always receive stress.
In free verse, each line should contain its own image or part of an image to make it distinct. To make each line stand out to the reader, you should create vivid descriptions to evoke specific responses. Careful readers should come away from each line with a sensory impression and with another piece of information to add to their understanding of the poem as a whole.
An Example of Free Verse
“
Tarzan
Episode 716: Jane Walks to the Watering Hole” by Todd Scott Moffett is an example of a free-verse poem. When you read the following first few lines of this poem, notice the arrangement of the lines and the effect of the separated lines acting almost like a second poem. Also, take note of the way each line ends, and the images contained within the lines.
The crazy chimpanzees spring
like bandits
from the curtain of green trees
.
She's too tired
to scream anymore, the
humid jungle
thickening her hair against
her glistening neck
.
Keeping this poem and the elements of free verse in mind, try an exercise. Take a favorite poem written by someone else, and explore its form to change its shape and rhythm. Don't alter the words or the order of the wordsâsimply play with the line lengths, the line breaks, the stanza forms, and so on, to see how the poem looks in its new arrangement. Is it better or worse than the original?
Closed Form
Closed-form poetry dominated the canon for so many centuries that many people still think it is the only way to create poetry. Of course, this is not the case. But if you feel that free verse is too free for you, then you can also try the many closed forms available. You will learn about these forms in depth later in the book, but for now, take a look at the general ways closed-form poems may be classified: