Creative Writing

Various Elements,
Techniques, and
Literary Devices in
Specific Forms of
Poetry
What is Poetry?

Poetry is a form of literature which allows the writers who

called to be “poets” to express their thoughts, feelings,
emotions, ideas about a particular theme or topic. When
reading a poem, it is common that we get confuse between
poet and persona.
Remember that poet is the author of the poem or literary
piece while persona is the SPEAKER or narrator of the poem.
Poetry is recognizable by its greater dependence on at least
one more parameter, the line, than appears in prose
composition. It will be easy for us to identify if the literary
piece is under poetry. Poetry is cast in lines. It uses forms and
elements and does not use ordinary syntax. We do not use
ordinary sentence formation since there are elements and
techniques used by the poets. Basically, poetry has significant
elements that can be used by the poets to strengthen their
techniques and sustain it for recognition of poetic styles.
Elements will help the poets to address the message of the
literary pieces to the audience or readers.
Here are some of the elements of poetry as categorized into
six sub-elements namely, structure, sound, imagery,
figurative language, fictional elements, and poetic forms.

Theme is the lesson about life or statement about human

nature that the poem expresses.
— Though related to the concept of a moral, or lesson,
themes are usually more complicated and ambiguous.
— To describe the theme of a poem is to discuss the
overarching abstract idea or ideas being examined in the
poem.
– A major theme is an idea that a writer repeats in his work,
making it the most significant idea in a literary work.
– A minor theme, on the other hand, refers to an idea that
appears in a work briefly and gives way to another minor
theme.

Presentation of Themes
– the feelings of the main character about the subject
written about
– through the thoughts and conversations of different
characters
– the experiences of the main character in the course of a
literary work
– the actions and events taking place in a narrative
Functions of Themes
– binds together various other essential elements of a
poem
– is a truth that exhibits universality and stands true
for people of all cultures
– gives readers better understanding of the main
character’s conflicts,
experiences, discoveries, and emotions
– gives readers an insight into how the world works or
human life can be viewed
Theme Vs Subject
– A poem’s subject is the topic of the poem, or what the poem
is about
– The theme is an idea that the poem expresses about the
subject or uses the subject to explore

Example:
– So, for example, in the Edgar Allan Poe poem “The Raven”,
the subject is the raven, who continually repeats a single word
in response to the speaker’s questions.
– The theme of the poem, however, is the irreversibility of
death—the speaker asks the raven, in a variety of ways,
whether or not he will see his dead beloved again, to which the
raven always replies “nevermore.”
Tone
In fact, it suggests two attitudes: one concerning the people
you’re addressing (your audience) and the other concerning
the thing you’re talking about (your subject).
That’s what the term tone means when it’s applied to poetry
as well. Tone can also mean the general emotional weather of
the poem.
– the attitude expressed in a poem that a reader sees and
feels
– the writer’s attitude toward the subject or audience
A. STRUCTURE

Form is the appearance of the words on the page of the

reference. It may be different
nowadays since layout artist may simply adjust and create the
desired form of poem.

Poetic Line or Line is a group of words that form a single line

of poetry.

Example: “I wandered lonely as a cloud” from “I Wandered

Lonely As A Cloud (Daffodils)” by William Wordsworth
Kinds of Metrical Lines/Numbers of
Feet

monometer = one foot on a line

dimeter = two feet on a line
trimeter = three feet on a line
tetrameter = four feet on a line
pentameter = five feet on a line
hexameter = six feet on a line
heptameter = seven feet on a line
octometer = eight feet on a line
Almost all accentual-syllabic poetry in English, except for
isolated lines in lyrics, will have four or five feet in the line.
Probably trimeter through hexameter will be all the terms you
will ever have to use.

Stanza is a section of a poem named for the number of lines it

contains.

Example: "In the winter it's every kid's dream, / As snowflakes

begin to appeal, / That suddenly there'll be a blizzard, / And
they'll cancel school for the year"
 Kinds of Stanza

Couplet = a two line stanza

Triplet (Tercet) = a two stanza
Quatrain = a four line stanza – This is the usual kind of
stanza
Quintet = a five line stanza
Sestet (Sextet) = a six line stanza
Septet = a seven line stanza
Octave = a eight line stanza
Enjambment is when there is no written or natural pause at
the end of a poetic line, so that the word-flow carries over to
the next line. It affects the forms of the poem on a page. It can
create certain form relevant to a poem’s content. The general
rules of Capitalization and Punctuation in poetry are not
always followed; instead, they are at the service of the poet’s
artistic vision.

Verse is a line in traditional poetry that is written in meter

Example: From A Midsummer Night's Dream by William

Shakespeare “Hippolyta, I wooed thee with my sword, And
won thy love, doing thee injuries.
Traditional Form
‘’ Poems with rhyme and with meter.
Free Verse:
“ Unlike metered poetry, free verse poetry does NOT have
any repeating patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables.
Does NOT have rhyme.
‘’ Free verse poetry is very conversational - sounds like
someone talking with you. A more modern type of poetry.

Blank Verse:
“ Written in lines of iambic pentameter but does NOT use
end rhyme.
‘’ With METER without end RHYME
B. SOUND
Rhythm is the basic beat in a line of a poem.
Example: Edgar Allan Poe's "Alone," which is a poem where the meter
is iambic, and Emily Dickinson's "Will There Really Be a Morning?" that
is trochaic.

Meter is a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. Meter happens

when the stressed and unstressed syllables of the words in a poem are
arranged in a repeating pattern. In meter, when poets write, they need
to count out the number of stressed (strong) syllables and unstressed
(weak) syllables for each line. They repeat the pattern throughout the
poem.
FOOT is a unit of meter.
A foot can have two or three syllables.
Usually consists of one stressed and one or more unstressed syllables.

TYPES OF FEET
The types of feet are determined by the arrangement of stressed and unstressed
syllables.

TYPES OF FEET
1. trochee (adjective form, trochaic) stressed-unstressed
a. Never/ never/ never/ never/ never
b. In the/ spring a/ young man's/ fancy/ lightly/ turns to/ thoughts of/ love.
(In spite of a few feet where the stress is debatable, especially foot 3, this
poem is generally trochaic, as a look at the rest of it would show. It is very
common to omit the final unstressed syllable in this meter; see c. under
accentual syllabic above.)
2. anapest (anapestic) unstressed-unstressed-stressed
a. It was man/y and man/y a year/ ago (The variation in the last
foot is common.)
b The Assyr/ian came down/ like a wolf/ on the fold,
And his co/horts were gleam/ing in purp/le and gold.

3. dactyl (dactylic) stressed-unstressed-unstressed

a. This is the/ forest pri/meval, the/ murmuring/ pines and the/
hemlocks
(The two stressed syllables in the last foot are required by the
classical Greek form of the epic, which Longfellow is imitating.)
b. What if a/ much of a/ which of a/ wind
4. spondee (spondaic) stressed-stressed
The spondee appears in isolated feet and never as a dominant meter in an
entire poem. It is a convenient way of describing feet in which it is hard to
determine which syllable is stressed (e. g., young man's and hemlocks
above) and of describing passages like the following from sonnets, where
Donne uses the spondees to hammer home the woes people can face in
life and Hopkins uses them along with internal rhyme, assonance, and
alliteration for an unusual sound effect.
a. All whom/ war, death,/ age, ag/ues, tyr/annies,
Despair,/ law, chance,/ hath slain,/ and you/ whose eyes
Shall be/hold God
b. Crushed. Why/ do men/ then now/ not reck/ his rod?
5. pyrrhic (pyrrhic) unstressed-unstressed. See 6 d. below for an
example.
At the/ round earth's/ ima/gined cor/ners blow.
The beginning of this line from Donne has a Pyrrhic Foot followed by a
Spondee. This combination (called a Double or Ionic Foot) often appears
at the beginning of a line.

6. iamb (iambic) unstressed-stressed

The iamb is far and away the most common foot in English, comprising as
much as
90-95 percent of English verse. It is also the most conversational of the
feet and
therefore the most flexible and most susceptible to variations. One such
variation,
as illustrated in the previous two quotes, is the substitution of spondees
for iambs.
Others are listed below:
a. Five years/ have passed,/ five sum/mers with/ the length
Of five/long wint/ers! . . .
In addition to the spondees in the first line, the word with receives what
is called a courtesy accent; that is, it must be given more than normal
conversational stress to fill out the line. Critics have argued that the basic
rhythm of spoken English usually dictates about four stresses per line
(the form of Old English verse) and that lines of poetry with five feet will
therefore contain one courtesy accent. This example also shows how a
poet can manipulate meter for effect. Wordsworth stresses the sense of
the time lapse by repeating five and long (and its noun form length) and
stressing these words in normally unstressed positions.
b. Scoffing/ his state/ and grin/ning at/ his pomp.
In addition to the courtesy accent in the fourth foot, Shakespeare includes
a trochee in the first foot. A trochee in an iambic line is called a reversed
foot. In iambic pentameter verse, a reversed foot occurs frequently in the
first foot, sometimes in the third and fourth, and almost never in the second
and fifth.
c. To be/ or not/ to be;/ That is/ the question.
The extra unstressed syllable at the end of the line, though not common, is
still a possible variation in an iambic line. Note the fourth foot is reversed
(unless you startle people by saying "That IS the question," as Peter O'Toole
is said to have done in one production of Hamlet).
d. At the/ round earth's/ ima/gined cor/ners blow.
The beginning of this line from Donne has a Pyrrhic Foot followed by a
Spondee. This combination (called a Double or Ionic Foot) often appears
at the beginning of a line.
e. Of all/ that in/solent Greece/ or haught/y Rome,
An anapest in an iambic line is more common in some ages and poets (here,
Jonson) than in others.
f. And my/ tears make/ a heaven/ly Lethe/an flood.
This line by Donne shows such a wide range of variations that we might not
call it iambic if it were not in a sonnet with other iambic lines. As a
clergyman, Donne almost certainly pronounced heaven as one syllable
(the way it is in hymns), and he appears to have stressed the second syllable
of Lethean. The line thus contains three regular feet, a spondee, and an
anapest. Donne generally makes his "Holy Sonnets" very irregular to
combine powerfulemotion and a oratorical effect as in a sermon. But the
point is that knowing what the regular meter was supposed to be helps us
identify and describe the effect Donne creates.
There are some other exotic feet such as the amphibrach (unstressed-
stressed_x0002_unstressed), but for all practical purposes, these six are the o
you need to know).

Rhythm is the beat created by the sounds of the words in a poem. It can be
created by meter, rhyme, alliteration, and refrain.

There are five types of rhythm, but we will just focus with Accentual-syllabic.
The number of syllables and the number of accents is both counted, and the
stressed
and unstressed syllables are usually alternated in a consistent pattern. When
we think of poetry in English, this is the form we think of, and it is the most
common form from the time of Chaucer to the advent of free verse in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries:
a. And justify the ways of God to men. (5 accents, 10 syllables)
b. And malt does more than Milton can (4 accents, 8 syllables)
To justify God's ways to man.
c. Wake: the silver dusk returning (4 accents, 8 syllables with final
Up the beach of darkness brims. unstressed syllables in lines 2 & 4
And the ship of sunrise burning omitted, a common variation)
Strands upon the eastern rims.

HOW TO FIND A METER IN ACCENTUAL-SYLLABIC VERSE

1. Find syllables that would ordinarily be accented in a dictionary and in conversation.
In the line "And justify the ways of God to men," for example, the first syllable in justify
and the syllables comprising ways, God, and man would receive stress in normal
conversation. There is a problem: although in the dictionary and in analyzing meter,
we usually talk as if there were only two levels of stress (stressed and unstressed),
linguists suggest that there may be as many as four in actual spoken English. Thus,
in the word justify, the just is stressed more than i or fy, but fy is stressed more than i.
Nevertheless, if you look at enough lines, you should be able to get an overall sense
of the meter. The important thing to remember is that skillful poets will have a meter,
which fits a pattern, but which is also true to the actual rhythms of spoken English;
their work should sound natural.
2. Because poets want their work to sound natural, the meter of a given line, or even
passage, may vary slightly from the basic pattern; therefore, you need to go over
several lines assigning the stresses where they would fall in normal conversation. If you
ook at enough lines, a general pattern should emerge.

3. A stressed syllable will be accompanied by some unstressed syllables, and in

English they usually (though not always) come before the stressed syllable. A
stressed syllable and the unstressed syllable(s), which go with it, are called a Foot.
If you look at several lines, it should become clear whether the unstressed syllables
precede or follow the stressed.

4. After you have found the stressed and unstressed syllables, you may then put
strokes between the feet to determine the meter. The meter depends on the Type
and Number of feet in a line. In the example below, the type of foot has an
unstressed syllable followed by a stressed, and there are five such feet. The meter
would therefore be labeled iambic pentameter (iambic for the type of foot and
pentameter for the number).
The cur/ few tolls/ the knell/ of part/ ing day.