/lit/ - Literature

>>16694052
Cringe

Very few people on /lit/ seem to understand poetry. Most don't know what it is, thinking it's little more than prose broken into lines and maybe a little more attention on how the words sound. You are wrong. Poetry is about condensed meaning, and as such it is superior to prose. A novel will take hundreds and hundreds of meandering pages and incorporate dozens of characters to convey a theme. A poem, when done well, conveys the same theme in only a few lines. Characters are not necessarily. Settings are not necessary. Plots are not necessary.

We're going to look at a short yet meaningful poem first. This is "The Eagle," by Alfred Tennsyon, First Baron Tennyson.

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.

Now, the most obvious feature of this poem is the rhyme. Each line in the two stanzas has end rhyme. But we want more than that, more than recognition of poetic devices and features. Think about the effect this produces. For one, it gives a sense of unity to those stanzas, which is heightened by the (fairly) regular meter. Let's consider that meter more closely. Most lines seem to be iambic pentameter. And yet, like all good poets, Tennyson changed this meter subtly to produce meaning. It is not enough to follow a meter (or rhyme scheme, or any poetic device), you must also vary your usage in order to evoke meaning. Lines 2 and 3 exhibit trochaic substitution- their initial feet begin with a stress instead of a slack. How does this effect meaning? For one, it binds these words together. The eagle is close to the Sun, but he is still ring'd in by the azure world. What connection can we draw? Perhaps the eagle's very proximity to the Sun is what keeps him ring'd in. Or, venturing into some deeper meaning, consider the mythology around eagles in Western culture. They are the kings of birds. Perhaps Tennyson means that, however noble and close to the heavens such a creature is, it is nonetheless bound by the world, a representation of its 'creatureliness.'

>>9411555
Please don't