“The Farm on the Great Plains” by William Stafford
There are seven stanzas with four lines in each stanza making it a quatrain. Euphony is very present in this poem; the lines flow very well. I found a lot of assonance. For example: the first line – telephone, goes, and cold, sixth line- ringing, listening, [...]
“After Great Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes” by Emily Dickinson
This poem has 3 stanzas with 4 lines (quatrain) in the first and last stanza and 5 (cinquain) in the middle stanza. The rhyme scheme is a,b,c,c so there are rhyming couplets at the end of each stanza. This poem was pretty complicated for me but [...]
“Lai with Sounds of Skin” by Chryss Yost
This poem has 2 stanzas with 8 lines in each stanza. There is an interesting rhyme scheme of a,a,b,a,a,b,a,a. There are three rhyming couplets in each stanza. Yost also uses alliteration: “living linen”, “warp, weave”, “tightly-twisted thin”, “spoken to silken to spool” and “skin to skein to skin”. [...]
“Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter” by Robert Bly
This poem is only one stanza, it is very brief and has five lines (cinquain). Even though Bly uses simple adjectives such as cold, snowy, and deserted, to describe things, there is still a huge presence of imagery. Since his words were so direct [...]
“My Grandmother’s Love Letters” by Hart Crane
There are four stanzas, generally with 4 lines in each stanza (quatrain). Crane uses several metaphors in this poem: “There are no stars tonight but those of memory” (comparing stars to memories), “Yet how much room for memory there is in the loose girdle of soft rain” (comparing [...]
“The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost
This poem has an a,b,a,a,b which is a little unusual but it reads nicely. There are four stanzas in a cinquain form. This poem is very symbolic because it is about choices, and not actually about the choice between two literal roads. I think that Frost is saying [...]
rhythm is produced by a series of recurrences
several kinds of recurrent sounds are possible in poems
when we talk about rhythm we are talking about the recurrence of stresses and pauses
stress is a greater amount of force given to one syllable than another
stressed words can come out slightly louder or higher in pitch
stresses that recur at [...]
In Sir Thomas Wyatt’s poem, “With Serving Still”, the emphasis on words varies between each line; in the first line the stressed words are the last two and in the second line it is the first two, and so on. In Dorothy Parker’s poem, “Resume”, the stressed words seem to be the first word [...]
“The Mother” by Gwendolyn Brooks
This poem’s rhyme scheme is generally a, a, b, b with many rhyming couplets but a few lines are in there without rhyme. The title of the poem is somewhat ironic because it is about abortion and the title is “The Mother”. The first line shows personification of the word [...]
“Ballad of Birmingham” by Dudley Randall
This poem has eight stanzas and four lines in each stanza making it a quatrain. What makes this poem interesting is how each stanza is in quotations because the author makes it a conversation between a child and mother. The poem is about the bombing of a Church in [...]
