Creative Writing
Poetry Examples:
 Ballad
 Blank Verse
 Concrete/Shape
 Shakespearian Sonnet
 Found
 Haiku
 Limerick
 Ode
 Ottava Rima
 Prose
 Tanka
 Terza Rima
BALLAD
“The Legend of Lady Godiva”
(based on British Legend)
When powerful lords ruled England
in the days of King Canute,
Godgifu rode through Coventry
wearing her birthday suit.
Society then had women
well out of public view.
Godgifu showed much charity.
She was religious too.
Leofric, the Earl of Mercia,
her husband in God's name,
would persecute the church she served
and commonfolk the same.
To pay for Canute's bodyguard
he never showed mercy,
imposing heavy taxes on
the folk of Coventry.
Godgifu quarrelled frequently
to beg he change his ways,
to plead that he be lenient
and not take all their pays.
One day they had an argument
this much he had to say,
"I promise to remit the tax
if you on market day
will ride the streets of Coventry
stark naked on your horse."
Knowing full well his pious wife
would not do this, of course.
But Leofric had forgotten of
Godgifu's great concern
and compassion for the people.
They showed respect in turn.
Lady Godgifu requested
that people stay inside
behind their shuttered windows when
she passed by on her ride.
“The Legend of Lady Godiva” (Cont.)
It was such a famous journey.
The beautiful and fair
Lady Godgifu rode the streets
clothed just in long blonde hair.
There only was one person who
could not resist a peep,
the tailor, now called 'Peeping Tom'
struck blind, and left to weep.
The tyrant Leofric kept his word
and stopped collecting tax.
He changed his ways. In Coventry
the people could relax.
The couple patched their differences,
sought out God together.
The legend of that daring ride
will live on forever.
It was such a famous journey.
The beautiful and fair
Lady Godgifu rode the streets
clothed just in long blonde hair.
Home Burial by Robert Frost
Blank Verse
“Home Burial”
Robert Frost
We are all doomed to broken-off careers,
And so’s the nation, so’s the total race.
The earth itself is liable to that fate
Of meaninglessly being broken off.
(And hence so many literary tears
At which my inclination is to scoff.)
I may have wept that any should have died
Or missed their chance, or not have been their best,
Or been their riches, fame, or love denied;
On me as much as any is the jest.
I take my incompleteness with the rest.
God bless himself can no one else be blessed.
O hold your doctrine of Memento Mori.
And were an epitaph to be my story
I’d have a short one ready for my own.
I would have written of me on my stone:
I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.
Excerpt from Macbeth, William Shakespeare
om Macb
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Concrete/Shape
Shakespearian Sonnet
Sonnet 116
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments, love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever fixèd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown although his height be taken.
Love's not time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come,
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom:
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
Sonnet 18
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,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to Time thou grow’st.
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Found Poem
The following poem is made up of random Tweets
mostly sad
elaborate schemes and elaborate lies
trapped in an open space, illusion of my own
i will save myself
there is somewhere i'd rather be
i'm such a positive person, oh wait
i need a new perspective,
i was never meant to stay in your phone
who wants to donate to me for the sake that i am pathetic?
i'm grappling with the fact that in a way, i'm kind of innocent
i have gotten so bad recently to the point that whenever i go out,
i think everyone is judging me on my face, my hair, my body, my clothes
terribly good and terribly bad are both equally terrible
Based on To Kill A Mockingbird
This is a truth
that applies to the human race,
yet to no particular race of men:
You never really understand a person,
until you consider things from his point of view,
climb inside of his skin,
and walk around in it.
One thing that doesn't abide,
by majority rule;
a person's conscience.
It was times like these
When;
you rarely win,
only children weep,
the dead bury the dead,
one does not love breathing,
and there’s just one kind of folks:
folks.
I don't pretend to understand,
Why reasonable people,
go stark raving mad,
simply because they're still human;
that the one place,
where a man ought to get a square deal,
is in a courtroom,
be he any color of the rainbow.
Based on To Kill A Mockingbird, cont.
It was times like these,
That,
food comes with death,
flowers with sickness,
and little things in between;
two soap dolls,
a broken watch and chain,
a pair of good-luck pennies,
and our lives.
It made me sad.
Yet delete the adjectives,
and I'd have the facts;
it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.
Haiku
Richard Wright (1908-1960)
Whitecaps on the bay:
A broken signboard banging
In the April wind.
Kijo Murakami (1865-1938)
First autumn morning:
the mirror I stare into
shows my father's face.
Limerick
There was an Old Man in a tree,
Who was horribly bored by a Bee;
When they said, 'Does it buzz?'
He replied, 'Yes, it does!'
'It's a regular brute of a Bee!'
There was an Old Man with a flute,
A sarpint ran into his boot;
But he played day and night,
Till the sarpint took flight,
And avoided that man with a flute.
Lyric
“Dying”
by Emily Dickinson
I heard a fly buzz when I died;
The stillness round my form
Was like the stillness in the air
Between the heaves of storm.
The eyes beside had wrung them dry,
And breaths were gathering sure
For that last onset, when the king
Be witnessed in his power.
I willed my keepsakes, signed away
What portion of me I
Could make assignable,-and then
There interposed a fly,
With blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz,
Between the light and me;
And then the windows failed, and then
I could not see to see.
Lyric example #2
“I felt a Funeral in my brain”
Emily Dickenson
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading - treading - till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a
Drum -Kept beating - beating - till I thought
My Mind was going numb And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space - began to toll,
As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange
Race Wrecked, solitary, here And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down –
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing---then –
Ode
Ode to a Nightingale
John Keats, 1795 - 1821
1. My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
‘Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness,—
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
2.
O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:
3.
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs,
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.
4.
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.
5.
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast fading violets cover’d up in leaves;
And mid-May’s eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.
6.
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod.
7.
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
8.
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toil me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now ‘tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?
Ottava Rima
Lord Byron
I want a hero: an uncommon want,
When every year and month sends forth a new one,
Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,
The age discovers he is not the true one;
Of such as these I should not care to vaunt,
I’ll therefore take our ancient friend Don Juan—
We all have seen him, in the pantomime,
Sent to the devil somewhat ere his time.
- Don Juan, Canto the First, Stanza I
In this example, note the abababcc rhyme scheme and how Lord Byron generally uses iambic
pentameter verses but modifies it for certain verses.
For example, line 6 is in strict iambic pentameter:
I’ll THERE | fore TAKE | our AN | cient FRIEND | Don JUAN
He is There
When sorrow lies entrenched within your heart
And doubts, like ocean waves, around you churn,
When chaos reigns o’er life and won’t depart
And for the peace of yesterday you yearn,
When evil thoughts are tearing you apart
And there is nowhere left for you to turn,
When dark of night persists throughout your day,
It’s time to fall upon your knees and pray.
For God is there, He’s always by your side,
He is your life’s companion and your friend,
He’s with you through each bitter storm you ride,
From morn’s first light to sunset at day’s end.
You must give up your bitterness and pride
And to your Lord extend your hand again.
He only wants for you to ask Him in
And you will be forgiven for your sin.
Prose
“Be Drunk”
Charles Baudelaire, 1821 - 1867
You have to be always drunk. That’s all there is to it—it’s the only way. So as
not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to
the earth, you have to be continually drunk.
But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.
And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the
mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already
diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock,
everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling,
everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . .ask what time it is and
wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: “It is time to be drunk! So as not
to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on
poetry or on virtue as you wish.”
Tanka
Beautiful mountains
Rivers with cold, cold water.
White cold snow on rocks
Trees over the place with frost
White sparkly snow everywhere.
Pretty colored trees
That are orange, red and yellow
In the Autumn air
An old barn by the water
With a white fence around it.
The leaves change colour
When the fall winds start to blow,
Yellow, orange and brown
Are the colours of fall leaves,
Slowly falling from the trees.
Terza Rima
Acquainted with the Night By Robert Frost (1923)
I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain — and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,
But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.