POETRY; THE STRUCTURE BEHIND THE WORDS #by Anthony Abten

 POETRY
Intro,

That a poem is to be read for its "message,"

That this message is "hidden" in the poem,

The message is to be found by treating the words as symbols which
naturally do not mean what they say but stand for something else,
You have to decipher every single word to appreciate and enjoy the poem.
 Poetry is the art of streamlining words to convey a hidden message to
the audience.
This "art" Is made of several patterns, structure, styles, rules, guidelines etc
An important method of analyzing a poem is to look at the ' stanza
structure or style ' of a poem.

Generally speaking, Structure has to do with the overall organization
of lines and/or the conventional patterns of sound.

Again, many modern poems may not have any identifiable structure i.e.
they use mostly free verse.
 When writing a poem, you consider,
1: Message
2. Style
3. Structure
4. Punctuation marks
 You got your message
E.g "nature "

Your "style " is next

 STYLE / FORM :

A poem may or may not have a specific number of lines, rhyme scheme
and/or metrical pattern, but it can still be labeled according to its
form or style.

Here are the three most common types of poems according to form:
Lyric poem
Narrative poem
Descriptive poem

Lyric poem conveys strong emotions and feelings in a poem.

Narrative poem tells a story, more like prose but the style distinguish it.

Descriptive poem explains the world or anything,  giving vivid facts
about such entity. The first style  ask
"what emotion do you want to reveal towards nature ( note, nature
here, is an example)  is it good or bad.
The second style ask
"what event did nature affect, be it rain, sun,  hazard, etc"

 The third style ask
"what is there in nature, you want to talk about, plants,  animal life etc.
After choosing such,  we move to the structuring,

The stanzas
The sound patterns
The metre and rhyme

 STANZAS:

 Stanzas are a series of lines grouped together and separated by an
empty line from other stanzas. They are the equivalent of a paragraph
in an essay. One way to identify a stanza is to count the number of
lines.

 Thus:
couplet (2 lines)
tercet (3 lines)
quatrain (4 lines)
cinquain (5 lines)
sestet (6 lines) (sometimes it's called a sexain)
septet (7 lines)
octave (8 lines). But some of these stanza may have its own rhythm
rule,  like the cinquain.

SOUND PATTERNS:

Three other elements of poetry are rhyme scheme, meter (i.e. regular
rhythm) and word sounds (like alliteration). These are sometimes
collectively called "sound play" because they take advantage of the
performative, spoken nature of poetry (like spoken word poetry) and
more rhyme (page poetry) .

RHYME:

Rhyme is the repetition of similar sounds. In poetry, the most common
kind of rhyme is the
end rhyme , which occurs at the end of two or more lines.

 Example of end rhyme

Forlorn fleas flee in "fray,"
Flutter in circles of "glee,"
No pressure for the riding "gray:"
Nor the tales of a soldier "bee."
The rhyme scheme is " abab"

Meter:

The systematic regularity in rhythm; this
systematic rhythm (or sound pattern) is usually identified by
examining the type of "foot" and the
number of feet.

A foot is traditionally the number of syllable per line stressed and unstressed

A foot is
 "Nor the tales of a soldier bee"
Feet are
"No pressure for the riding gray:
Nor the tales of a soldier bee."

Syllabic count
/Nor/ /the/ /tales/ /of / /a/ /sold/ /ier/ /bee/  8 syllable.

Blank Verse: Any poetry that does have a set metrical pattern (usually
iambic pentameter) , but
does not have rhyme , is blank verse.
 Free verse, frankly, has no rules about meter or rhyme whatsoever!
[In other words, blank verse has rhythm, but no rhyme, while free
verse has neither rhythm nor rhyme.
African poets love free verse because its simple, easy, quick, not stressful.

Structure to words.
I, learned of the ways of Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, Robert
frost, William Blake etc,  have been drilled to understand that,
The structure you use can make and destroy your work.
If you see the rules as blocks,  you won't succeed.

First,  get your message into the words,
Then shape the words into the structure.
Style has to do with the design of the structure,
Like the design on a book or dress.
Style,  is what gives the poem edge.
We have different types of style Like,
Sonnet,
Ballad,
Ode,
Villanelle
Elegy etc.

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