Structure and Form

My senior year of college, I took a class called Honors 212: The Arts in Performance. The day we started the section on poetry, the professor started out by asking the class if someone could give a definition of poetry (I think he was expecting that we wouldn't be able to come up with one easily), so I said "Words arranged in a structure for an aesthetic effect." Even the professor accepted that definition without challenge.

The first poems I ever wrote rhymed, but had no fixed meter. They were, not uncoincidentally, rather terrible. In my defense, I was in elementary school at the time, and didn't even know what meter was. A lot of people don't, even though meter is a more important component of poetry in the English tradition than rhyme. One of my classmates that day in Arts in Performance admitted that she didn't understand meter at all; people could tell her what it means but she just couldn't pick up on it. Meter, in poetry, is the emphasis placed on syllables, the distinctness and loudness with which a syllable is enunciated, also known as syllabic stress. And even if English speakers don't know what the term means, we can all hear it, because in English stress is phonemic, which means it can change the meaning of the word.

Linguists determine if a sound in a language is phonemic by finding minimal pairs, two words that native speakers can distinguish as separate words which differ only in one sound. Think of the word "defect" when it's a noun meaning a flaw, and when it's used as verb meaning to leave your country or team for another. The difference between the pronunciation of these words is that the noun has emphasis on the first syllable and the verb has emphasis on the second syllable. The noun form is a trochee: a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable. The verb is an iamb: an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable.

The units of syllables that make up a poem's meter are called feet. The other disyllabic metrical feet are the spondee, with two stressed syllables, and the pyrrhus, with two unstressed syllables. Trisyllabic feet include the stressed-unstressed-unstressed dactyl, the unstressed-stressed-unstressed amphibrach, and the unstressed-unstressed-stressed anapest. There are also tetrasyllabic feet, but they're not used much in English poetry, as it's difficult for us anglophones to put three syllables in a row without stressing one syllable more or less than the others.

Incidentally, the most common vowel sound in the English language is one we don't have a letter for: the schwa. It's the vowel in the second syllable of "cactus", "dactyl", "second", "vowel", "syllable", and most other unstressed syllables. In the International Phonetic Alphabet it's represented by the letter ə.  

Getting back to poetry, the most common foot in traditional English metrical poetry (or at least the most famous one) is the iamb, especially familiar in the iambic pentameter, lines consisting of five iambs each. Shakespeare's plays, most sonnets, and heroic couplets employed iambic pentameter.

Many traditional poetic forms have a fixed meter, though of course most have exceptions and substitutions somewhere in their rhythm. I used to believe great poetry was pure inspiration, pouring from the poet's mind without any deliberate attention given to form. But the truth is, writing poetry with no understanding of the language you're using is like trying to paint in the dark. It's a lot easier to come up with euphonious lines when you can see what you're doing.

Writing poetry in a fixed form, such as a tanka or a sonnet, at first seems like it would constrict creativity, limit what the poet can express. I've found that's not the case. Usually a poem begins as an image, or one or two lines that just come to you. The rest of the poem takes work. Having a fixed form makes that work easier. As your mind searches for rhymes to fit the pattern or the right arrangement of words to fit the meter, ideas and images arise that would not otherwise occur to you. A fixed form doesn't limit creativity; creativity expands to fill it.

The following is a Spenserian sonnet, a poem consisting of three quatrains (stanzas of four lines) and a concluding couplet (two rhymed lines) in iambic pentameter with a rhyme scheme of abab bcbc cdcd ee. I wrote it as a gift for my professor. I chose the title later, when I realized that I hadn't even had the story of the flood in mind when I wrote it, which just goes to show that even the poet herself can read more into a poem than she originally intended it to mean.

No Relation to Noah

Look outside; it’s raining once again.
No shadow moves against the silver tide.
On days like this, one must wonder when
Life will manifest again outside.

When will the weeping sky’s blue eye be dried?
And does the sun, unseen, still send its kiss?
A disconcerting secret seems to glide
Through rain and life’s disrupted synthesis.

And there have been storms lonelier than this--
Uncaught, unheard. What color was the world
Unseen by eyes? I think the rains might miss
The time before Earth’s strange surprise unfurled.

And what does this resentful rain portend?
All life began, so must it also end?