RVP, Week Four
Poetry-reading techniques: rhyme schemes
Wordsworth
Technique: Rhyme
scheme
• Like any other element of a poem, can be read
as a deliberate choice about how to organize
information
• Deviation and extreme regularity can, alike, be
read
Possibilities: rhyme
schemes
• A: sets out a thought or idea
then
A: idea returns—consistency
or
B: new idea—alternating
• This can continue for as long as stanza allows
A Contrast
Pope, Essay on Man
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan
The proper study of Mankind is Man.
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A Being darkly wise, and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride,
Shakespeare, “Sonnet
XVIII”
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 dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.
———A simple Child,
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,
What should it know of death?
I met a little cottage Girl:
She was eight years old, she said;
Her hair was thick with many a curl
That clustered round her head.
She had a rustic, woodland air,
And she was wildly clad:
Her eyes were fair, and very fair;
—Her beauty made me glad.
…
“But they are dead; those two are dead!
Their spirits are in heaven!”
’Twas throwing words away; for still
The little Maid would have her will,
And said, “Nay, we are seven!”
Techniques so far and
exercise
• Close-reading techniques
• polyvalence and the OED
• basic scansion/rhythm
• Unusual sentence structure
• Repetition
• Occasion
• implied addressee
• ideal recipient
Towards context I:
Isolation
“…as might seem
Of vagrant dwellers in the
household woods,
Or of some Hermit’s cave,
where by his fire
The Hermit sits alone.”
(“Tintern,” 19-22)
• WHERE ELSE?
Towards context II:
City, House, Country
So he took me thro’ a
stable, and thro’ a church,
and down into the church
vault, at the end of which
was a mill. Thro’ the mill
we went, and came to a
cave. Down the winding
cavern we groped our
tedious way, till a void
boundless as a nether sky
appear’d beneath us, and
we held by the roots of
trees, and hung over this
immensity.
Ere on my bed my limbs I lay,
It hath not been my use to pray
With moving lips or bended
knees;
But silently, by slow degrees,
My spirit I to Love compose,
In humble trust mine eye-lids
close,
With reverential resignation
No wish conceived, no thought
exprest,
Only a sense of supplication;
A sense o'er all my soul imprest
That I am weak, yet not unblest,
Since in me, round me, every
where
Eternal strength and Wisdom are.
--Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and
connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark sycamore, and
view
10
These plots of cottage-ground, these
orchard-tufts,
Which at this season, with their unripe
fruits,
Are clad in one green hue, and lose
themselves
'Mid groves and copses.
What might we say
about “setting?”
PERFORMANCE
• Oral presence
• Are speeches hard, or even impossible, to say out loud?
• Do the speeches arrange speech in particular ways?
• Is there a rhythm to the words, or some other oral ordering?
• Embodiment
• Does the poem intend that any particular sort of person say
the poem?
• Does the poem describe a speaker, and if so that speaker’s
body?
“Tintern Abbey” out loud
• What is the rhythm of the poem, noticed in
oral presentation?
• Where is it regular, where is it not?
• Where does this amplify the poem’s meanings;
where might it challenge them