Narrative Poetry:
-a poem that tells a story and has a plot
Lyric Poetry
-a short poem of songlike quality
Exploring the difference between narrative and lyric verse.
Narrative poetry is based in the traditions of storytelling and folk tales. It always
has a plot- something happens. A narrative poem usually tells a story using a
poetic theme. Narrative poems were created to explain oral traditions. The focus
of narrative poetry is often the pros and cons of life. Types of narrative poems
include:
1. Epic - a long, serious poem that tells the story of a heroic figure
2. Ballad - a narrative poem that tells a folk tale or legend and often has a
repeated refrain. The ballad’s 4-3-4-3 line beat in matching quatrains has
become the most familiar spoken-word and recorded poetic form of modern
times.
3. Idyll - either a short poem depicting a peaceful, idealized country scene, or
long poems that tell a story about ancient heroes. The word is derived
from the Greek word 'eidyllion' meaning "little picture". Idylls can be lyric
poems if their subject matter tends towards the pastoral.
4. Lay - a long narrative poems, especially one sung by medieval minstrels
and French trouveres.
5. Romances
Read some narrative poetry online:
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"The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"The Destruction of Sennacherib" by Lord Byron
"Casey at the Bat" by Ernest L. Thayer
"The Eve of St. John" by Sir Walter Scott
"The Walrus and the Carpenter" by Lewis Carroll
"The Lay of the Last Minstrel" by Sir Walter Scott
"The Raven" by Edgar Allen Poe
"The Legend of Gelhert" by Josie Whitehead
"The Pied Piper of Hamelin" by Robert Browning
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"The Ballad of Swift Nick" by Josie Whitehead
"The Holy Grail" by Lord Alfred Tennyson
"Ave Maria" by Alfred Austin
"On Turning Ten" by Billy Collins
More.....
Lyric poetry is a genre of poetry that expresses personal and emotional feelings. It
is usually short and song-like. In the ancient world, lyric poems were those which
were sung to the lyre. Lyric poems do not have to rhyme, and today do not need to
be set to music or a beat. The lyric poem, dating from the Romantic era, does have
some thematic antecedents in ancient Greek and Roman verse, but the ancient
definition was based on metrical criteria, and in archaic and classical Greek
culture presupposed live performance accompanied by a stringed instrument.
1. Sonnet - English (or Shakespearean) sonnets are lyric poems that are 14
lines long falling into three coordinate quatrains and a concluding couplet.
Italian (or Petrarchan) sonnets are divided into two quatrains and a six-line
sestet.
2. Ode - a long poem which is serious in nature and written to a set structure;
often a tribute to a person, place, thing, or sentiment.
3. Haiku - a Japanese poem composed of three unrhymed lines of five, seven,
and five syllables often based on an image.
4. Villanelle - a nineteen-line poem with two rhymes throughout, consisting of
five tercets and a quatrain, with the first and third lines of the opening tercet
recurring alternately at the end of the other tercets and with both repeated at
the close of the concluding quatrain.
5. Cinquain - a short, usually unrhymed poem consisting of twenty-two
syllables distributed as 2, 4, 6, 8, 2, in five lines.
6. Aubade - a song or poem greeting the dawn or describing a dawn parting.
7. Ghazal - a lyric poem with a fixed number of verses and a repeated rhyme,
typically on the theme of love, and normally set to music. This form of
poem is traditional to the Middle East.
8. Bhajan - any type of Indian devotional song. It has no fixed form. Often,
bhajans praise the sacred and holy.
9. Pastoral - a poem that depicts rural life in a peaceful, idealized way for
example of shepherds or country life.
10.Romantic verse - Nature and love were a major themes of Romanticism
favoured by 18th and 19th century poets such as Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe
Shelley and John Keats. Emphasis in such poetry is placed on the personal
experiences of the individual.
11.Elegy - a sad and thoughtful poem lamenting the death of a person.
Read some lyric poetry online:
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Dante's lyric poems
"In Memory of W.B. Yeats" by W.H. Auden
"Oh Captain! My Captain!" by Walt Whitman
"America" by Robert Creeley
"Ode to the West Wind" by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"When I consider how my light is spent" by John Milton
"Sonnet 18" by William Shakespeare
"Ode to Tomatoes" by Pablo Neruda
"Ode to Joy" by Friedrich Schiller
"Aubade: Lake Erie" by Thomas Merton
"Ode to a Nightingale" by John Keats
"Even the Rain" by Agha Shahid Ali
"The Ghazal of What Hurt" by Peter Cole
"Do not go gentle into that good night" by Dylan Thomas
"The Sonnet-Ballad" by Gwendolyn Brooks
"Ode to Joy" by Buster Baxter
An assortment of bhajans including audio files
Stories of Beijing--Part Two
A dark tunnel under the streets of Beijing
A mother tries to wake her child from his bed of newspaper
She looks frail and lost
He looks hungry and weak
My brother and I, well fed and healthy
Watch this scene with the itch of tears starting to form
We look at each other in the shame of being blessed
And without a word, we walk up to her, emptying our pockets on the way
She recoils at first, and I can't help but think of a beaten dog
My composure wants to fail
I want to cry
Instead, I give her the brightest and most gentle smile I can muster
We hold out our hands, wishing we could do more for them
She looks at it, and quickly looks back at us ... in shock ... or suspicion
We nod, and she takes the 500 RMB, enough to feed them for quite some time
It's all we had on us, and anything less would have insulted our purpose there
Few things are as great, as giving til' it hurts ... giving all
Looking at the ground, she takes our hands and kisses them
She's crying, and doesn't want to look at us
I duck down so she has to look at me, and she does
I kiss her hand like she did mine and smile at her again
She smiles back ... and it is a thing of pure beauty
The whole world couldn't buy the memory of that smile from me
We came out of the other side of the tunnel ... penniless ...
The richest men alive
“Summer”
Walter Dean Myers
I like hot days, hot days
Sweat is what you got days
Bugs buzzin from cousin to cousin
Juices dripping
Running and ripping
Catch the one you love days
Birds peeping
Old men sleeping
Lazy days, daisies lay
Beaming and dreaming
Of hot days, hot days,
Sweat is what you got days