Poet's Workshop #5: Rhythm and Rhyme

Yep, today we're going to be talking about poetry! To be honest, poetry is a lot like prose writing (that's the fancy-pants word for stories and whatnot). Poetry just has extra rules that limit what you can say and how you can say it. I'm gonna walk you through a couple different types of poems, getting more complex as we go. Hopefully, you'll start to understand the rules of poetry. After that, you'll be writing poems like a boss!

First, let's start with an easy one: haiku. Haiku are Japanese, which means two things: first, Japanese doesn't really have a concept of rhyming, since the language is based on syllables rather than letters. Second, Japanese doesn't have emphasis, so haiku don't have meters, which I'll get into. Instead, a haiku limits how many syllables are in each line. In Japanese, it's a little more complex, but in English, we'll stick to 5-7-5. I don't need to explain syllables, do I? One has one, double has two, and syllable has three. Get it? Got it? Good. Let's look at an example. This is a haiku by the famous poet, Bashou:

furuike ya
kawazu tobikomu
mizu no oto

Which translates to:

an ancient pond
a frog jumps in
the splash of water

Okay, so the English doesn't come out into the right syllables. That's besides the point. What I wanted to show you was what annoys me about fake haiku: haiku are not sentences! Haiku should convey sound, emotion, and nature without stooping to a straight 17-syllable sentence. Say, something like this:

Wind through the meadow
Let petals dance through the breeze
like fragments of grace.

When you write haiku, try to express something without explicitly saying it. In fact, that's a good way to think about all poetry!

Next, let's look at blank verse. If you've read The Epic of Twilight, that's what I'm writing it in. Blank verse doesn't rhyme, so I don't have to talk about that yet. However, it does have a meter, so now I have to explain what that is. Meter is basically which syllables are accentuated and which ones aren't. If this seems confusing, try reading this sentence out loud. Do you notice how you stop for a fraction of a second on the syllable "fu" in "confusing," or the "sen" in "sentence?" That's emphasis. It'd sound weird if you said "CON-fusing" or "sen-TENCE," right?
In poetry like blank verse, you have to pick words so that the emphasis lines up correctly. That's called the meter. There are lots of different types of meter, but they're all based on something called "feet." There are also a bunch of different types of feet, but the one we're interested to start with is the "iamb." An iamb starts and stops in time. The first of two is left alone. The second part is emphasized. In fact, if you are reading this, you'll notice how the syllables are lining up most perfectly. The meter here is only such that iambs are applied. If I misuse a word, can you recognize when it is done? /iambic Did you catch it? "Can" bungles the meter.

If you listen really closely to the emphasis of the words you use, you shouldn't have a problem with this. (If you are having trouble, what I like to do is tap my fingers in beat. For iambs, tap with your middle finger, then tap and release with your index finger. Pause, then do it again. The emphasis lines up with the pause.) There's one more catch, though. We know what feet to use in blank verse, but if you read it, you'll notice that the lines end in weird places. That's because each line uses exactly five iambs. This is called "iambic pentameter," and it's the meter of blank verse. See, that's really easy! Let's hunt down a couple of lines from my poem and see what I mean:

Create, O Muse, the story I must tell,
of heroines and ponies of that world
which they, three tribes, did name Equestria.

Try reading it with a lot of emphasis on the iambs. Cre-ATE, O MUSE, the STO-ry I must TELL. It still sounds good, right? Now try reading this:

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble.
Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the caldron boil and bake;

If you try emphasizing every other syllable, it sounds wrong. Dou-BLE, dou-BLE, toil AND trou-BLE. That's because that isn't iambic. It's trochaic. (Trochaic tetrameter, to be exact.) Instead of no emphasis, emphasis, it's actually the other way around! DOU-ble, DOU-ble, TOIL and TROU-ble. I'll try to mention the other feet later, but for now, let me stick to iambic pentameter.

So, now you know how to write blank verse. But if we want to write a sonnet, we have to... DUN DUN DUN... rhyme! Sonnets are exactly the same as blank verse, only now we have to add rhyming. Rhyming is actually pretty tough if you're not good at it. It's not enough for a word to end with the same letters. Heck, it's technically not always enough to just end with the same sound! When you're trying to rhyme words with multiple syllables (the ten-dollar word for that is polysyllabic), all of the syllables should be similar, save the very first one. For example, "starter" and "carter," or "breezy" and "easy." "Porter" doesn't actually rhyme with "starter," even though they both end with the same "-ter" sound. Likewise, "floozy" doesn't rhyme with "easy."

So when you write a poem like a sonnet, certain lines have to rhyme. There are two main types, but the more common is the Shakespearean or English sonnet. Here's the pattern: A-B-A-B, C-D-C-D, E-F-E-F, G-G. In other words, you've got three sets of four lines where the first and third rhyme and the second and fourth rhyme. Then you end it with a rhyming couplet. This comes out to fourteen lines total. As an example, let's look at a pretty popular sonnet, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day:"

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, (day and May rhyme)
And summer's lease hath all too short a date. (date and temperate rhyme... kinda)
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines, (rhymes with shines)
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimmed; (rhymes with dimmed)
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st, (Note: the apostrophe means that a syllable has been omitted to fix the meter.)
Nor shall death brag thou wand'rest in his shade, (rhymes with fade)
When in eternal lines to Time thou grow'st.(rhymes with ow'st)
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. (thee rhymes with see)

Now's a good time to talk about structure. You may be asking, "What's the point of separating the lines like that? Why not just say it's 12 lines of that pattern, then two lines of a different one?" That's because each part is intended to have a certain meaning. For example, in the Italian Sonnet (ABBA,ABBA,CDECDE) The first two quatrains (set of four) is the "problem," and the sextet (set of six) is the "resolution."

Okay, that might be a bit too high concept for this. Let's move on to one last poem type: the Limerick! Limericks aren't too bad. They're not as long as sonnets, and their rhyme scheme isn't nearly as tough. The meter, however, is a bit more interesting.

First, the rhyme scheme: AABBA. When limericks are written, the couplet is usually indented out from the rest of the poem, so that you know that it rhymes differently. Let's look at one:

There was a young lady named Kite
Whose speed was much faster than light.
She left home one day
In a relative way
And returned on the previous night.

See how it rhymes? If you're looking at structure, you may notice that the couplet in the middle starts a new thought; this is normal for limericks. But, do you also see the meter? It changes halfway through! It's not supposed to do that! :'( Yup, limericks cheat. So, what kind of meter is it? Is it iambic? If it were, you'd expect "young" to be emphasized, but it's not. You might think you're smart and say, "Well, then it must be trochaic!" Nope, you'd be wrong there, too. "There" isn't emphasized. Only "was," "la-," and "Kite" are. This is called a amphibrach. It's got a three syllable set of no emphasis, emphasis, no emphasis. So we read the first line, marking it with amphibrachs: "There WAS a young LAdy named KITE..." Wait, where's the last part of the third amphibrach? Well, limericks like to change the length of the ending. You can do this, or you can do a full amphibrach, like this: "There ONCE was a MAN from NanTUCKet," or you can even add an extra syllable to the end of the third one: "There WAS a young RUStic named MALlory." I know, it's so confusing! Just remember, whatever length you do for the first line, you have to match for the second and fifth line.

And then we get to the couplet in the middle. You always chop off one of the amphibrachs so that it's shorter. "She LEFT home one DAY" is only one and a bit, whereas the first two lines were two and a bit. Again, you can play with the end a little, but it doesn't have to match the first two ends. And then the last line matches the first two, and it's usually a punchline. Limericks are funny!

These are probably the most popular poetic forms you'll see. If you're interested in poetry, there's a whole slew of things to think about! The diamante, the ode, the acrostic, the rhyming couplet, terza rima, and the dreaded sestina. In fact, you can even make up forms if you want to! That's why I love poetry so much. There's a rhythm, a flow, an art to it that you don't get in prose. A lot of people don't like the structure because they think it limits them. But I think it forces you to be creative! Try it! Poetry doesn't have to be stuck to angsty teenagers and spoony romantics. You, the masses, can make great poetry too!

EXTRA THOUGHT:
Remember, poets like to cheat to make the meter work. I already mentioned the apostrophe in words like, "e'er," "o'er," or "would'st." But you can also "add" syllables. Do you remember in Romeo and Juliet, when Romeo laments that he has been banished? He never says "banished," though. He says, "banishéd." That accents means you pronounced the "-ed" as though it were it's own syllable. Instead of "BAN-ished," you say, "BAN-ish-ED."