What a Poem's Form Tells You

The idea

This unit has given you the working vocabulary of English verse, and every term in it serves one purpose on the exam: to read what a poem does. Start with who speaks, because the speaker is not the poet and the exam asks for the speaker's tone, the attitude the words project, and the mood the reader feels. Diction and syntax carry that tone: plain English words against Latin ones, and sentences inverted for meter, which you restore before answering. Then hear the line. Meter counts stresses grouped into feet; iambic pentameter, five rising feet, is the common English line, and the trochee, anapest, dactyl and spondee vary it. Scansion is the procedure for naming a meter, and under time you name it by its pulse and its beats. The older English line counted stresses and bound its halves with alliteration, and Hopkins's sprung rhythm returned to counting stresses alone. Blank verse is meter without rhyme; free verse has neither. Rhyme comes in kinds, end and internal, full and slant, masculine and feminine, and a rhyme scheme letters the pattern. Sound devices, alliteration, assonance, consonance and onomatopoeia, make sense audible. Stanzas run from the couplet to the nine-line Spenserian stanza, and the fixed forms follow: the Petrarchan sonnet's octave and sestet, the Shakespearean's three quatrains and couplet, Spenser's interlocked variant, and the villanelle's two refrains. The ballad tells a story in rhymed quatrains, the ode praises and reflects, the elegy mourns and consoles, the epic raises a hero and the mock epic shrinks its subject, and the dramatic monologue lets a character betray himself. Form is not decoration. It tells you where the turn is, where the emphasis falls and whose voice you hear, and the answer to most poetry questions sits in that knowledge.