ABSTRACT- English poetry has a great complexity. It employs several elements: theme, imagery, tone, sound, and rhythm as the key elements; not to mention figurative languages, and connotation. This paper highlights the challenges EFL students may face in writing English poetry, and offer some practical ways in dealing with them.
From the classroom practise, the writer has detected that rhyme and rhythm are the most difficult elements for students to apply in their poems. Therefore, these two aspects are the most challenging. By encouraging to use thesaurus, ultimately students can make rhyming poems. In terms of rhythm, students are not able yet to apply a fixed metrical pattern in their poems. The patterns vary to each line of their poems.
INTRODUCTION
It is most likely that everyone is aware that poetry is the most difficult to understand among other literary works. Poetry is a special form of literature. It looks different from other forms of writing, and it sounds different. Many students say that they hate poetry, probably because it takes more effort to understand poetry than prose or play.
Meanwhile, it is quite strange when people search for an appropriate way to express their feelings, such as in times of tragedy, they naturally turn to the poem as a means of expression. We can check a daily newspaper to read examples. For a condolence, for example, people wish to put into words their feelings of loss and remembrance. We all have favourite songs, and what is a song but a poem set to music? We spend time in greeting card stores searching for the perfect card to reflect our wishes for a happy birthday, an anniversary; most of these wishes are written in verse form.
Sometimes a poetic slogan sticks in our head for the entire day. All of these instances prove that poetry is everywhere in our everyday lives. We seem to have a need for forms of expression that include rhyme and rhythm.
Poetry can tell a story, describe an object or situation, narrate an event, or simply express feelings. Whatever the substance of the remarks and the ultimate message, poetry is characterized by linguistic elements that go beyond standard sentence structure.
Initially, poetry might be defined as a kind of language that says more and says it more intensely than does ordinary language. William Wordsworth defined poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, recollected in tranquillity" (cited in Kennedy and Gioia, 1995). Poetry is the most condensed and concentrated form of literature, saying most in the fewest number of words.
Poetry is language whose individual lines have a higher voltage than most language has. It is language that grows frequently incandescent, giving off both light and heat. Therefore, it can be recognized only by the response made to it by a good reader.
The problem, however, is that not all of us are good readers. Poor readers will see poetry as nonsensical. How can poetry be described as moving and exciting when they find it dull and boring. To their eyes, poetry is no more than a fancy way of writing something that cannot be said more simply.
Poetry is a kind of multidimensional language. Ordinary language that we use to communicate information is one dimensional, since it is directed only at the listener’s understanding. Its one dimension is intellectual. Poetry, the language used for communicating experience, has at least four dimensions. If it is to communicate experience, it must be directed not only at the listener’s intelligence but also at his senses, emotions, and imaginations.
To put it conclusively, dealing with poetry is dealing with language at a higher level than usual. For students and teachers alike, reading, teaching and appreciating poetry is a direct means of the mastery of the language involved. It is plausible to surmise that the use of language where words, forms, images, sounds, meaning, and music are so carefully intertwined.
THE KEY ELEMENTS OF POETRY
There are several devices said to be the key elements of poetry; namely theme, imagery, tone, sound, and rhythm. Each contributes equally to the harmony of a poem.
a. Theme
The theme is the controlling idea of a literary work. The controlling idea of a poem is the idea continuously developed throughout the poem by sets of key words that identify the poet's subject and his attitude or feeling about it. It may also be suggested by the title of a poem or by segment of the poem. It is rarely stated explicitly by the poet, but it can be stated by the reader and it can be stated in different ways. The controlling idea is an idea, not a moral; it is a major idea, not a minor supporting idea or detail; and it controls or dominates the poem as a whole.
The word theme is here used to name the particular subject matter of the poem in relationship to the reader's previous observation of the life about him / her and within him / her. Theme, then, here refers to those broad generalizations and high-order abstractions which each person develops in dealing with the common experiences of life.
If we read Shakespeare’s ‘Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer Day’ or ‘My Mistress Eyes are Nothing Like the Sun’, we obviously can say that the two poems are love poems. Yet, his ‘No Longer Mourn for Me when I am Dead’ or ‘Fear No More the Heat O’ the Sun’ has a death theme, as indicated by the titles.
b. Imagery
To easily interact with poetry, we have to understand how the poet uses image to convey more than what is actually said or literally meant. We speak of the pictures evoked in a poem as 'imagery'. Imagery refers to the "pictures" which we perceive with our mind's eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin, and through which we experience the "duplicate world" created by poetic language. Imagery suggests the meaning and truth of human experiences not in abstract terms, as in philosophy, but in more perceptible and tangible forms. This is a device by which the poet makes his meaning strong, clear and sure. The poet uses sound words and words of color and touch in addition to figures of speech. As well, concrete details that appeal to the reader's senses are used to build up images.
Although most of the image-making words in any language appeal to sight (visual images), there are also images of touch (tactile), sound (auditory), feeling of physical action (kinesthesia), images of using one sense to evoke another (synaesthesia), taste (gustatory), and smell (olfactory). The last two terms in brackets are mainly used by lovers of jargon. An image may also appeal to the reader's sense of motion.
An image may occur in a single word, a phrase, a sentence, or an entire short poem. To speak of the imagery of the poem—all its images taken together—is often more useful than to speak of separate images.
Another thing to remember about imagery is that the image needs to be particular and specific. Instead of saying tree; we would better say aspen or oak or banyan. Rather than saying bird, it is better to say toucan. When we say toucan, we actually help to set the scene because toucans live only in jungle.
Imagery is certainly an effective way of recalling obvious experiences. It is also used by the poet to convey emotion, to suggest ideas and to cause a mental reproduction of sensations.
c. Tone
Tone, in literature, may be defined as the writer's or speaker's attitude toward the subject, the audience, or toward herself/himself. In poetry tone is important. We cannot really understand a poem unless we accurately sense whether the attitude it manifests is playful or solemn, mocking or reverent, calm or excited. But the correct determination of tone is much more delicate matter than it is with spoken language, for we do not have the speaker’s voice to guide us. We must learn to recognize tone by other means. Almost all the elements of poetry go into indicating its tone: connotation, imagery, and metaphor; irony and understatement; rhythm, sentence construction, and formal pattern.
d. Sound
The sound patterns of poems are classified into three: alliteration, assonance, and rhyme.
English poetry has alliteration, which can be defined as a succession of similar sounds. Alliteration occurs in the repetition of the same consonant sound at the beginning of successive words, or inside the words.
Repetition that occurs at the beginning of successive words is popularly called initial alliteration, while the occurrence inside the words is called internal alliteration or hidden alliteration. For example: “round and round the rugged rocks the ragged rascal ran” is initial alliteration. Hidden alliteration can be seen in the following excerpt from Milton’s Paradise Lost, as cited in Kennedy and Gioia (1995) :
On sudden open fly
With impetuous recoil and jarring sound
The infernal doors, and on their hinges grate
Harsh thunder, that the lowest bottom shook
Of Erebus
Alliteration does not depend on spelling. Phantom alliterates with flower, but not with pneumonia; cease alliterates with scissors but not with chime. Might alliterates with main, hide with hair, fit with foe, bold with brass, etc.
Most poets save alliteration for special occasions. They may use to give emphasis, as George Herbert does in his “Virtue”, as cited in Hurford (1996) :
Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright
The bridal of the earth and sky
Alliteration can also be a powerful aid to memory. The tongue twisters like: Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers and She sells sea shells by the sea shore or common expressions like: green as grass, tried and true, and from stem to stern, are relatively hard to forget.
In addition, the use of alliteration can help to create a connection or a contrast between ideas, but sometimes, it is used merely for decoration and makes little contribution to the meaning of the whole poem.
If alliteration is to repeat the sound of a consonant, assonance is to repeat the sound of a vowel. Like alliteration, assonance may occur either initially or internally. For example: all the awful auguries, and a mind at peace with all below, are initial assonance, while Edmund Spenser’s “her goodly eyes like sapphires shining bright, and her forehead ivory white, are internal assonance. Assonance can also help make common phrases unforgettable, such as: eager beaver, and holy smoke. Like alliteration, it slows the reader down and focuses attention.
Another sound pattern is rhyme. Although much English poetry is unrhymed, rhyme is one means to set poetry apart from ordinary conversation, and bring it closer to music. A rhyme occurs when two or more words or phrases contain an identical or similar vowel-sound (usually accented), and the consonant-sounds that follow the vowel-sound are identical, as in hay and sleigh, and prairie schooner and piano tuner. From these examples it can be seen that rhyme depends not on spelling but on sound.
Like other patterns of sound, rhyme can help a poet to group ideas, emphasize particular words, and weave the poem together. It can start reverberations between words and can point to connections of meaning.
To have an exact rhyme, sounds following the vowel sound have to be the same: red and bread, wealthily and stealthily, walk to her and talk to her. If final consonant sounds are the same but vowel sounds are different, the result is slant rhyme (imperfect rhyme): sun rhyming with bone, moon, rain, green, gone, thin. A slant rhyme can help a poet say some things in a particular way. It works especially well for disappointed let-downs, negations, and denials, as in Blake’s couplet, as cited in Kennedy and Gioia (1995) :
He who the ox to wrath has moved
Shall never be by woman loved.
If the rhymed words or phrases have the same beginning and ending consonant sound but different in vowel, the result is consonance; as in chitter and chatter, spoiled and spilled. End rhyme comes at the ends of lines, internal rhyme within them. Most rhyme tends to be end rhyme. A poet may employ both end rhyme and internal rhyme in the same poem, as in Robert Burn’s satiric ballad “The Kirk’s Alarm”:
Orthodox, orthodox, who believe in John Knox
Let me sound an alarm to your conscience
There’s a heretic blast has been blawn i’ the wast
That what is not sense must be nonsense
Masculine rhyme is a rhyme of one-syllable words (jail, bail), on stressed final syllables (in words of more than one syllable): divorce, or horse with remorse. Feminine rhyme is a rhyme of two or more syllables, with stress on syllable other than the last: turtle with fertile, gladness with madness. Thomas Hood’s The Bridge of Sighs contains feminine rhymes of three syllables:
Take her up tenderly
Lift her with care
Fashioned so slenderly
Young, and so fair!
If the spellings look alike but pronunciations differ, the result is eye rhyme, as in rough with dough, idea with flea, or Venus with menus. Strictly speaking, eye rhyme is not rhyme at all.
e. Rhythm
Rhythm or meter is the repetition of stress within a poem. It is the entire movement or flow of the poem as affected by rhyme, stress, diction and organization. The meter of a poem emphasizes the musical quality of the language and often relates directly to the subject matter of the poem. In most poems, the lines are written according to patterns of rhythm. Poetic meter is the measure of a line of poetry. It is rhythm that can be measured in poems, as in the following example:
I came, I saw, I conquered.
The repeated pattern of unstressed to stressed syllables in the above line tends to move the reader forward, pushing him through the line in a rhythmic, methodic way. This adds to the meaning of the line, implying that the speaker came, saw and conquered quickly and methodically without much thought or emotion.
To make ourselves aware of meter, we need only to listen to a poem, or sound its words to ourselves. If we care to work out exactly what a poet is doing, we scan a line or a poem by indicating the stresses in it. Hence, the art of doing this is called scansion. Scansion is the act of making a poem to show the metrical units of which it is composed. It means any attempt, by signs, to indicate the beat of a line of poetry and to mark off the division of feet.
The smallest of these metrical units is the 'syllable'. English syllables are two kinds: accented or stressed, and unaccented or unstressed. An "accented syllable" requires more wind and push behind it than an unaccented; it also maybe pitched slightly higher or held for a slightly longer time.
After the syllable, the next largest metrical unit is the 'foot', which is group of two or more syllables. The six common kinds of feet in English metrics have been names derived from Greek, as cited in Perrine (1969):
1. IAMBIC foot consists of unaccented syllable followed by an accented. It can be heard in such words as “because, hello, Elaine”.
2. TROCHAIC foot consists of an accented syllable followed by an unaccented. These are trochaic words: answer, Tuesday, Albert.
3. DACTYLIC foot consists of an accented syllable followed by two unaccented syllables. You can hear the dactylic beat in these words: beautiful, silently, Saturday.
4. ANAPESTIC foot consists of two unaccented syllables followed by an accented syllable. These words are anapestic: cavalier, tambourine, Marianne.
5. SPONDAIC foot consists of two accented syllables.
6. PYRRHIC foot consists of two unaccented syllables.
The next largest metrical unit is the 'line'. A line is the regular succession of feet, and, though it is not necessarily a sentence, it customarily begins with a capital letter. The number of feet in a line of verse determines the measure or meter. Most poems are not built on a fixed meter, but rather on a combination of meters and variety of them. A line containing only one foot is called a "monometer"; one with two feet, a "dimeter" line; and so on through "trimeter", "tetrameter", "pentameter", "hexameter", "heptameter", and "octameter".
Must a poem have a meter? A large number of poets, especially in the early years of the twentieth century, answered this negatively. Their poems, written in rhythmical language but not in traditional meters, are called 'free verse'. Nonmetrical poetry is called free because the poet has freed himself from conforming himself to the set of metrical patterns. Free verse must not be confused with "blank verse', which is the customary label for iambic pentameter without rhyme. Unlike the free verse, blank verse has a regular metrical pattern.
Meter has two functions. First, it makes poem pleasurable because it is intrinsically delightful. In addition to making a poem enjoyable, meter makes it more meaningful. It is a part of the total meaning -- a part that cannot always be described in words, but can always be felt and is always lost when a poem is paraphrased or when it is translated from one language to another.
Most English meter is classified according to the same system as Classical meter with an important difference. English is an accentual language, and therefore beats and offbeats (stressed and unstressed syllables) take the place of the long and short syllables of classical systems. In most English verse, the meter can be considered as a sort of back beat, against which natural speech rhythms which vary expressively.
CHALLENGES IN CLASSROOM
For the last two years in my poetry class, I always assign students undertaking the course to be able to produce a piece of poem to apply theories they have learned. The poem they produce should apply one or two of the elements described above. Of all the elements, most students feel that rhyme and metrical pattern are two difficult things to apply in their poetry.
In dealing with those problems, I initially let them make their free verse poems. They are free to arrange their own poems no matter if they look like prose. The next step is the rearrangement of those words until they fit to either rhyme or certain metrical pattern. Very often, after the students have rearranged their words, the poems are still far from either rhyme or any metrical pattern. Therefore, I encourage them to do some revision. At this step, the students can alter to fit their poems to rhyme or a certain meter.
In terms of rhyme, I encouraged students to use thesaurus. Thesaurus is available at the computer, so it easier for students to utilize it when they make poetry. However, this computerized thesaurus is bound to certain limitation. Frequently, students find that thesaurus on certain words are not available or not found in the computer. For this circumstance, I suggested them to use a conventional one.
To illustrate to what extent the students can go, I present the following excerpts from students’ poems.
Excerpt 1:
The sky was very dark
And the rain didn’t stop yet
Rose lost in the park
And the earth would be wet
…………………………. (Naimah’s The Lost Rose)
From this excerpt, simply we can see that the poem rhymes abab. The word “dark” rhymes with “park”, and “yet” rhymes with “wet”. There is no certain metrical pattern applied in this excerpt, though line 1 and 3, and line 2 and 4 have exactly the same number of words. Line 1 applies iambic trimeter, line 2 and 3 tend to be anapestic, and line 4 is exactly anapestic dimeter.
Excerpt 2:
…………………………………………..
An angel hold my hand and wipe my tears
I‘m forced to be strong with a smile
When I look at the sky and stars
I know you love me and still mine
……………………… (Rina Adriana’s One More Day With You”)
Though it is questionable, this student has made eye rhyme. The spelling looks alike, but the sound is very much different. The word “tears” does not rhyme with “stars”, and the word “smile” does not rhyme with “mine”. In terms of meter, line 1 applies iambic pentameter, line 2 slightly fits to anapestic trimeter, line 3 and 4 does not suit to any meter.
Excerpt 3.
…………………………
I wish you’re happy there
Live with huge dare
No more fears
No more tears
(A.A Hasaniah’s When You’ve Gone Away”)
This excerpt rhymes aabb. The word “there” rhymes with “dare”, and the word “fears” rhymes with “tears”. This student has successfully made rhymes, but it is unlikely that she has tried to fit to certain meter.
From the three excerpts above, it is obvious that students can considerably make rhyming poems. However, it is likely that students are still having problems with meter. The students seem to get difficulty in recognizing which syllables are accented and unaccented in English words although they have been equipped with dictionaries providing high explanatory support.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
Poetry is deliberately a high voltage language. In other words, poetry uses the best words in the best order. That is why, dealing with poetry is dealing with language at a higher level than usual. Words, images, sounds, and meaning are very carefully intertwined.
Students writing English poetry, at most, find that among the elements that build up the poetry, rhyme and rhythm are the most difficult to make. However, it does not mean that students cannot really make them. Thesaurus can help them deal with rhyme, while good dictionary helps them deal with rhythm.
Note: Naimah, Rina Adriana, and A.A. Hasaniah are three among 35 students undertaking “Poetry 1’ course at the English Department, Makassar State University, in Academic year 2005-2006.
REFERENCES
_______ (1992). The Australian Combined Dictionary Thesaurus. Melbourne: Oxford University Press.
Craig, Alexander. Ed (1971). 12 Poets 1950-1970. Brisbane: Jacaranda Press.
Frederick, J. Tirajoh. (1988). English Poetry. An introduction to Indonesian Students. Jakarta: Depdikbud
Hurford, Christopher. Ed. (1996). The Giant Book of Favourite Verse. London: Magpies Book Ltd.
Kennedy, X.J & Dana Gioia. (1995). Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama, Sixth Edition. New York: HarperCollins Publishers
Perrine, Laurence. (1969) Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry, Third Edition. New York: Harcourt & Brace and World Inc.
Wallace, Robert. (1991). Writing Poems. Third Edition. New York: HarperCollins Publishers
