When reading any poetry, there are certain things we can do in order to make the experience a fuller and more rewarding one, which, in many cases can give the reader a deeper understanding of the poem. However, in order to do this, we must first understand a few important things about poetry and the various tools poets have at their disposal. These tools can sometimes look difficult and even seem to require more effort than the reader is willing to give, but anything worthwhile requires a greater effort on our part, don’t you think? After all, if everything was easy, then what can we honestly say we have achieved?
Much of what this article covers is covered, or should be, in any poetry course at secondary school or university, and these things are useful for both poet and reader. However, sometimes, these tools don’t seem to impact the poetry at all, and if that’s the case, then there is no problem with that. Poetry is allowed to be one dimensional as well. But here, we will investigate the other dimensions of poetry; the dimensions which can give the poem more “poetic value”.
Poetry is made up of many different things which can either give more meaning to the words, or merely help the poet structure his or her thoughts into a concise, rhythmic mediation between the event and the reader. That’s not to say that the poet, once the poem is completed, is of no importance, because the poet can and does hold tremendous importance for fully comprehending the poem, as any biographical approach will maintain. However, when it comes to the tools the poet employs for the poem, the most important driving force is the facilitation between event and reader, as any conveyed event must be experienced if it is to have any value. What does the reader understand from the poem, and how does the reader relate with the event? How does the reader experience the poet’s conveyed experience? For this reason, the tools of poetry stand as the necessary bindings between active meaning and passive understanding.
One of the most important tools a poet will use is the foot. Not the one he stands on, or uses to kick underlings in the rear end, but the so called unit of metrical form which creates the basis of poetic structure. We may understand that a foot is a unit of metre in poetry, consisting of a combination of stressed and unstressed syllables, and without a knowledge of them, the poet will struggle to formulate consistently metrical rhythm which the reader will intuitively distinguish from prose. There are ten types of poetic foot in Western poetry, as there are only ten possible variations of two and three syllable forms, and they can be used as the driving metric force of the poem, or they can be used in conjunction with other feet to create cadences and pulses.
We categorise poetic feet into two groups: Disyllables and Trisyllables. Of the Disyllables, there are four feet types: Iamb, Pyrrhus, Trochee and Spondee. Of the Trisyllables, there are six feet types: Tribrach, Dactyl, Anapest, Bacchius, Amphibrach and Amphimacer. The structures of these ten feet types is based on mathematical variations of stressed and unstressed syllables, where Disyllables have four possible combinations of two syllables, and Trisyllables have six possible combinations of three syllables.
Note: u = unstressed and / = stressed
Looking at the four Disyllables, we find the following structures:
Iamb ([u /], such as “delight”) A metrical foot consisting of one short syllable followed by one long syllable or of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable.
Pyrrhus ([u u], such as “such as”) A metrical foot consisting of two short or unaccented syllables.
Trochee ([/ u], such as “badger”) A metrical foot consisting of one long syllable followed by one short syllable or of one stressed syllable followed by one unstressed syllable (as in apple).
Spondee ([/ /], such as “tooth-ache”) A metrical foot consisting of two long or stressed syllables.
Looking at the six Trisyllables, we find the following structures:
Tribrach ([u u u], such as “one dark night”) A metrical foot of three short syllables of which two belong to the thesis and one to the arsis.
Dactyl ([/ u u], such as “multiple”) A metrical foot consisting of one long and two short syllables or of one stressed and two unstressed syllables (as in tenderly).
Anapest ([u u /], such as “unaware”) A metrical foot consisting of two short syllables followed by one long syllable or of two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed syllable (such as unaware).
Bacchius ([u / /], such as “when day breaks”) A foot of three syllables, the first short, the other two long.
Amphibrach ([u / u], such as “impatient”) A metrical foot consisting of a long syllable between two short syllables in quantitative verse or of a stressed syllable between two unstressed syllables in accentual verse.
Amphimacer ([/ u /], such as “catch a star”) A trisyllabic foot consisting of a short syllable between two long syllables in quantitative verse or of an unstressed syllable between two stressed syllables in accentual verse.
Once we know the structures of poetic feet, we may then begin to discern other important poetic devices. For example, each of the feet types have a gender; either masculine or feminine. The masculine feet are Iamb [u /], Spondee [/ /], Anapest [u u /], Amphimacer [/ u /] and Bacchius [u / /]. The feminine feet are Trochee [/ u], Pyrrhic [u u], Dactyl [/ u u], Amphibrach [u / u] and Tribrach [u u u]. Note that those feet which end with a stressed syllable are masculine, while those which end with an unstressed syllable are feminine. Masculine and feminine endings can and do have impact on poetry, and sometimes poets use these forms to good advantage.
The pattern of the syllables within a foot, as noted above, is an important element to understand as it will also allow us to categorise the poem into a nameable family grouping. For example, a foot that is one unstressed syllable [u] followed by a stressed one [/], is an iamb of the disyllable group; three of these in a row would be an iambic trimeter ([u /] three times), while five make the well-known iambic pentameter. This rule applies to any combination, so that we can have in either the disyllable or trisyllable groups, for example, trochaic tetrameter ([/ u] four times), dactylic hexameter ([/ u u] six times) or anapestic octameter ([u u /] eight times). In fact, we can make any combination of foot type plus meter form in either the disyllable or trisyllable groups.
Further poetic devices include the types of meter the poet uses. These usually take one of eight types, and the structures look as follows:
Types of meter Syllables per line
1. monometer . 1 foot 1. Monosyllabic
2. dimeter . 2 feet 2. Disyllabic
3. trimeter . 3 feet 3. Trisyllabic
4. tetrameter . 4 feet 4. Tetrasyllabic
5. pentameter . 5 feet 5. Pentasyllabic
6. hexameter . 6 feet 6. Hexasyllabic
7. heptameter . 7 feet 7. Heptasyllabic
8. octameter . 8 feet 8. Octasyllabic
Metre is from the Greek word for measuring; at its most basic, metre is a system of describing what we can measure about the audible features of a poem. The systems that have been used in history to structure metres are: the number of syllables (syllabic); the duration of syllables (quantitative); the number of stressed syllables, or accents (accentual); and combinations of these. English is not a language that works easily in quantitative metre (although this has not stopped people trying), and it has developed an accentual-syllabic metre for its formal verse. This means that, in a formal poem, the poet will be counting the syllables, the stresses, and keeping them to a pattern.
In order to achieve all this, there must be an overall structure which keeps everything connected and organised in a way which allows the reader to instantly recognise the structure, while assisting the poem to enable all of the other poetic devices. To this end, the poet will employ stanzas. The use of stanzas is quite important, because a stanza is something like a framework, or scaffolding for the poem to hang on. Stanza forms can be classified by the number of lines they employ. Ascending from two to eight, stanzas can form a couplet, triplet, quatrain, quintet, hexastich, heptastich and octave. All of these types of stanza create both visual and audial structures for the written and spoken poem respectively. So, looking back, we could have a poem made up, for example, or iambic pentameter quatrains.
The process of working out where the stresses fall is called scanning, or scansion. It's easiest to do with poems where the rhythms are pronounced, whereas, it almost impossible, or rather, unhelpful, to scan free verse. However, for the most part, close readers of poetry should develop the skill of scansion, as it helps provide quick access to the deeper levels of poetic study. Generally, poets write with scansion automatically occurring in a kind of subconscious manner, but it is the reader who tries to read deeper, who must practice the technique.
A common device used by poets is the caesura, which is a break or pause in a line of poetry. This can be used to create various affects, or merely to fashion augmentation. But, all of this helps the poem’s rhyming component. A well-structured stanza can give the rhyming scheme a stronger influence over the poem, and, along with such poetic devices as caesuras, enjambment, elision, alliteration, assonance, ellipsis, metaphor, simile, metonymy, onomatopoeia and so on and so forth, the rhyming scheme can generate a natural rhythm in itself which helps facilitate the rhythmic mediation between the event and the reader.
We might observe some interesting things in just one small piece of poetry by the Australian Great War poet, Reynold Cleve Potter. Merely reading his poem on one dimension is interesting enough, but when we break it down into some of the observable poetic devices, we can get so much more out of the poem. The following is one interpretation.
Still Ascending
By Reynold Cleve Potter
Struggling mortals past Hell’s portals
Plunged in lurid flame,
Torn and bleeding, Hell’s fires feeding
With carnage; blight and shame.
Not theirs, O God, the shame who fight
But theirs who caused this awful blight.
The 6th stanza (above) of Potter’s poem, “Still Ascending”, is written using a subtle mix of trochaic feminine and iambic masculine endings, while the poem overall is masculine. The poem’s feet consist of two structural formations, where the quatrain structure forms tetrameter and dimeter, consisting of feminine, masculine, feminine, masculine endings, whereas the couplet at the end forms tetrameter, consisting of masculine, masculine endings.
Of the four lines consisting eight syllables each (octasyllabic), the first two are feminine, | / u | / u | / u | / u | (trochaic-tetrameter), and the last two are masculine, | u / | u / | u / | u / | (iambic-tetrameter). The other two lines consist of 5 syllables (pentasyllabic), | / u | / u / | (iambic/amphimaceric-dimeter) and u / u | / u / | (trochaic/amphimaceric-dimeter). The second of these two lines contains a floating, or silent syllable at the beginning. It doesn’t affect the stanza’s syllable count.
The 2nd and 4th lines of the quatrain comprise trochee and amphimacer feet, so we have feminine and masculine endings within the same line, indicating a union between man and woman. The 2nd line suggests innocence destroyed by man. However, the 4th line suggests innocence given gilt by man (‘Man’ in both instances indicates war). These suggestions are indicated by the masculine feet endings of the words, ‘flame’ and ‘shame’ respectively. Within the 2nd line, ‘shame’, the masculine foot, marries with ‘in’, the feminine foot, thus “in flame”. The 4th line, ‘shame’, the masculine foot, marries with ‘age’, the feminine foot, thus “an age of shame”. The last two lines of the stanza form a masculine heroic couplet, indicating the strength of the stanza’s moral.
The footed gender words at the end of each line indicate further information: lines 1 and 3, the only feminine lines, end with the words ‘portals’ and ‘feeding’ respectively, which indicate ‘motherly’. The mother is a portal for bringing life into the world, and she is the primary life giver by her feeding her child. Lines 2, 4, 5 and 6 on the other hand, are all masculine lines, and end with the words ‘flame’, ‘shame’, fight’ and ‘blight’ respectively, which indicate ‘war’ or ‘conflict’.
The rhyming scheme follows a Petrarchan style mini-sonnet, with (A,A), B, (C,C), B, D, D. The stanza is written in hexastich (6 line stanza) with a syllable count of 8-5-8-5-8-8 (syllables per stanza = 42). We may assert from this count that there is a subliminal connection with a dice game played at Gallipoli. When we check these numbers, we get the following, interesting information: 42 syllables divided by 6 lines in the stanza = 7. Throwing a 7 in the Gallipoli dice game was considered an omen of death, which may indicate that the stanza is a warning. The word, ‘With’, at the beginning of the 4th line is a throw away syllable and is not counted metrically, thus, Potter may indicate here that men “dice ‘with’ death”, as it falls in a masculine line. As the speaker of the poem is an observer (indicated by the 3rd person possessive plural pronoun, ‘theirs’), rather than a participant, the floating voice of the poem may be that of a mother’s, perhaps Australia as the ‘mother country’, who was the ‘portal’ for the soldier’s life and prime sustainer of life by ‘feeding’ the soldier. This may be recognised by the fact that ‘With’ (an unsounded syllable) is also unstressed, and means that it is by nature, feminine, according to poetic analytics. This conforms to the notion of the game of chance with dice and the thrower’s trust in ‘lady luck’.
But the moral of this stanza is two-fold; it both warns against wrongful blame, and assures that guilt should be apportioned to those who are actually guilty and not the innocent. By reading the poem this way, we might recognise that the poetic devices employed by Potter, when understood, help generate a fuller understanding of the poem. For the reader, Potter’s poem takes on much more meaning than a mere one dimensional, superficial reading. The poem now stands up with a louder voice, which is capable of making the reader investigate further, the realities of which Potter wrote. Suddenly, by reading the poem this way, we find ourselves able to make stronger assertions about the subject matter, as well as bring out into the open the hidden treasures not found in the superficial reading. For this reason, poetry in general packs much more into each line than does prose.
One might wonder how it is possible to walk in the foot prints of Australian Great War poets, but this is quite simple, and we may do this in varying ways. By simply reading the poetry of these poets, we necessarily walk in their foot prints. By understanding how poetry functions and how poets use poetic devices to convey rhythmic mediation between the event and the reader, we may walk in the poet’s foot prints in deeper ways than we ever thought imaginable. It is a journey the reader has access to, and the poet, by way of poetic devices, unites himself with the reader. In this way, we can see how the past unites itself to the future, and by poetic devices, this union aids war poetry as an historical document which produces more than a mere aesthetic rendering of an ugly event, but rather, a concise, rhythmic mediation between history and reader.
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