Meter and Rhyme in Poetry

Passages 1 and 2: Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster. Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art” *** But they were fucked up in their turn By fools in old-style hats and coats, Who half the time were soppy-stern And half at one another’s throats. Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don’t have any kids yourself. Larkin, “This Be the Verse” 1. Both of these passages are written in meter. In each passage choose one line and scan it by capitalizes the stressed syllables to show the pattern. Which poem has the most regular meter (the fewest variations)? 2. Mark the rhyme schemes you detect in these passages, using letters of the alphabet according to custom. Are the rhymes you have found exact, or near? Give examples. 3. Name the points of view in each poem, and tell me how you know. Passage Analysis 4: Aspen tree, your leaves glance white into the dark. My mother’s hair never turned white. Dandelion, so green is the Ukraine. My fair-haired mother did not come home. Rain cloud, do you linger over the well? My soft-voiced mother wept for everyone. ***** Miguel, you hid yourself One night in August, nearly at daybreak, But instead of laughing when you hid, you were sad. And your other heart of those dead afternoons Is tired of looking for you and not finding you. And now Shadows fall on the soul. Listen, brother, don’t be too late Coming out. All right? Mama might worry. Vallejo, “To My Brother Miguel” 1. What is the stanza form of the first passage called? 2. Though these poems come from different cultures, they have a lot in common. How are the themes and metaphors similar? Through an example, discuss the similarities between one metaphor from “Aspen Tree” and the extended metaphor of hide and seek in “To My Brother Miguel.” 3. Describe a significant difference between the traditional elegy and the modern elegy. Why would these poems be examples of the modern elegy? Passage 5: From blossoms released by the moonlight, from an aroma of exasperated love, steeped in fragrance, yellowness drifted from the lemon tree, and from its plantarium lemons descended to the earth. Tender yield! The coasts, the markets glowed with light, with unrefined gold; we opened two halves of a miracle, congealed acid trickled from the hemispheres of a star, the most intense liqueur of nature, unique, vivid, concentrated, born of the cool, fresh lemon, of its fragrant house, its acid, secret symmetry. Pablo Neruda, “Ode to the Lemon” 1. Label the BOLDED lines either endstopped or enjambed. Choose an example of each kind of linebreak and discuss why Neruda chose to use it at that moment, and what his poem gained. 2. In this poem, the lemon becomes a symbol through extensive use of metaphor. What associations and ideas about the lemon does Neruda introduce? Choose one idea and use evidence from the poem to describe Neruda’s reasoning. 3. What features or motivations of this poem (besides its title!) reveal that it is an ode?