What is this thing called poetry?
Lecture Two: The love poem
“Love is so short, forgetting is so long”
Pablo Neruda
“This we were, this is how we tried to love”
Adrienne Rich
A lyric poem is a comparatively short, non-narrative poem in which a
single speaker presents a state of mind or an emotional state. Lyric poetry
retains some of the elements of song which is said to be its origin. For
Greek writers the lyric was a song accompanied by the lyre.
“Someone is Writing a Poem” (1993) by Adrienne Rich
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/poetics-essay/239326
What poetry is made of is so old, so familiar, that it’s easy to forget that it’s
not just the words, but polyrhythmic sounds, speech in its first endeavors
(every poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome) …. And all this has to
travel from the nervous system of the poet, preverbal, to the nervous system
of the one who listens, who reads, the active participant without whom the
poem is never finished. Someone writing a poem believes in a reader, in
readers, of that poem…. most often someone writing a poem believes in,
depends on, a delicate, vibrating range of difference, that an “I” can become
a “we” without extinguishing others, that a partly common language exists to
which strangers can bring their own heartbeat, memories, images.
…..
Someone is writing a poem. Words are being set down in a force field .… The
theater of any poem is a collection of decisions about space and time—how
are these words to lie on the page, with what pauses, what headlong motion,
what phrasing, how can they meet the breath of the someone who comes
along to read them?
You (the reader) are the one who listens, who reads,
the active participant without whom the poem is
never finished
1. What does the poem
seek to do?
How does it hope to affect you, the reader?
2. How does the poem do
what it does?
When you write about the poem, examine the poet’s
decisions/choices in communicating with you
How does the poem do what it does?
Form
What Genre of poem is it? What Metre,
Rhyme scheme & Stanza structure is
used? (various forms in English poetry.)
In the absence of rhyme, is it blank
verse or free verse?
Close attention to the poet’s word
choice, imagery and metaphor
Design
Tone
The movement of thought in the poem. Where
does it begin and where does it end?
How is emotion conveyed or implied?
Diction
Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1609)
A sonnet sequence: 154 sonnets
1-126 – “fair youth”
127-152 – “dark lady”
Joseph
as Will Shakespeare
Joseph
Fiennes Fiennes
as Will in Shakespeare
in Love (1998)
in Shakespeare in Love (1998)
Vocabulary: M.H. Abrams Glossary of Literary Terms
Sonnet – one of the oldest verse forms. 14 lines of verse.
• Italian or Petrachan (abbaabba cdecde) (Octave and Sestet)
• English or Shakespearean (ababcdcdefefgg) (3 quatrains and a couplet)
Stanza – a grouping of verse lines in a poem
Quatrain – 4 lines of verse or a four line stanza form
Octave – (in a Petrachan sonnet) 8 lines of verse
Sestet – (in a Petrachan sonnet) 6 lines of verse
Couplet – (in a Shakespearean sonnet) a pair of rhymed lines
Shakespearean or English Sonnet
• A lyric poem in iambic pentameter (5 stresses per line)
• Rhyme scheme abab cdcd efef gg
• 3 quatrains (4 lines of verse) and a concluding couplet
Useful websites
“Types of Poetry”:
http://www2.anglistik.unifreiburg.de/intranet/englishbasics/PoetryTypes01.htm#dramatic
“Learning the Sonnet: A history and how-to guide to the famous form” by Rachel
Richardson: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/article/246410
Information about the sonnet form in the “Learning Lab” Glossary at the Poetry
Foundation website: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/glossaryterm/sonnet
“Intro to Poetry”:
http://www.starve.org/teaching/intro-poetry/welcome.html
“Sonnet 29” WilliamShakespeare
When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes, a
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
b
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, a
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
b
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
c
Featur'd like him, like him with friends possess'd, d
Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,
c
With what I most enjoy contented least;
d?
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
e
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
f
Like to the lark at break of day arising
e
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate; f
For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings g
That then I scorn to change my state with kings. g
Rufus Wainwright’s performance
of Sonnet 29 from the album
When Love Speaks (2002)
http://youtu.be/ngk4sRQ2C-Y
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (Viente
poemas de amor y una cancion desesperada) is a
collection of romantic poems by the Chilean poet
Pablo Neruda, first published in 1924, when Neruda
was 19. It was Neruda's second published work,
and made his name as a poet. Neruda won the Nobel
Prize for Literature in 1971 and is regarded by many
of one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century.
http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/po
et/pablo-neruda
“Tonight I Can Write” – Pablo Neruda
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
My sight searches for her as though to bring her closer.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.
Write, for example, ‘The night is shattered
and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.'
The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.
The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.
I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
Through nights like this one I held her in my arms
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.
She loved me, and sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.
To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.
What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is starry and she is not with me.
This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
Another's. She will be another's. Like my kisses before.
Her voice. Her bright body. Her infinite eyes.
I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.
http://youtu.be/yN3v3WoaR_Y
“Poem to My First Lover”
Sharon Olds
Now that I understand, I like to
Think of your terror – handed a girl
Mad with love, her long, fresh
Raw body thin as pared
Soap, breasts round and high and
Opalescent as bubbles of soap,
Laid across your legs, 18,
Untouched. I like to understand your
Terror, now, the way you took her
Deflowering her as you’d gut a fish,
Leaving in the morning with talk of a wife.
Now that I
Know about the fear of love
I like to think of her white-hot body
Greenish as a fish just landed, quivering and
Slapping on a rock – fallen into your
Lap, man, shuddering like your cock,
A woman crazed with love, hot off the
press, sharp as a tool never used,
Blazing across your thighs and all you could
Do in your fear was firk out her cherry like an
Escargot from its dark shell and then
Toss her away. I am in awe of the terror that will
Waste so much, I am in love with the girl who went
Offering, came to you and
Laid it out like a feast on a platter, the
Delicate flesh – yes, yes,
I accept the gift.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/sharon-olds
“XVII” from the sequence “Twenty-One Love Poems”
(1976)
Adrienne Rich
No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone.
The accidents happen, we’re not heroines,
they happen in our lives like car crashes,
books that change us, neighborhoods
we move into and come to love.
Tristan und Isolde is scarcely the story,
women at least should know the difference
between love and death. No poison cup,
no penance. Merely a notion that the tape-recorder
should have caught some ghost of us: that tape-recorder
not merely played but should have listened to us,
and could instruct those after us:
this we were, this is how we tried to love,
and these are the forces they had ranged against us,
and theses are the forces we had ranged within us,
within us and against us, against us and within us.
http://genius.com/Adrienne-rich-twenty-one-love-poems-annotated
http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/05/21/claiming-an-education-adrienne-rich-1977commencement/
http://www.metopera.org/metopera/history/stories/synopsis.aspx?customid=86