Hot answers tagged poetry
22
Who says we don't? Have you listened to rap or hip-hop lately? Anglo-Saxon poetry like Beowulf was heavily beat-based and while it didn't involve rhyme it used alliteration instead. The lines were recited to four stressed beats to a line with a coesura halfway between each one. I have long considered Anglo-Saxon poetry to be the rap music of its day.
21
Literacy, pens, paper, the printing press.
A written culture has different restrictions than an oral culture dependant on ease of repetition from memory.
According to the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections Center:
Beowulf is the oldest narrative poem in the English language, embodying historical traditions that go back to actual events and ...
16
This was to signify that the syllable was omitted. In most cases today, we don't pronounce the final syllable in many -ed endings that used to always be articulated. You can see a remnant of this in the word learned: We say that word in one syllable in the sentence
I learned a lot from him.
but pronounce it as two syllables in
He was a very learned ...
14
The usual meaning of "dawn" is "sunrise". It is used in a poetic way here to describe that after a long period of darkness, where the person just did not realize something, he finally came to the right conclusion.
The word "realize" itself makes no implication about how much time it took the person to come to this conclusion.
14
It's a subverted rhyme.
I hesitate to cite TV Tropes directly but the term has also appeared in ELU.
11
Wikipedia says it at least as well as I could have:
The grave accent, although not standardly applied to any English words, is sometimes used in poetry and song lyrics to indicate that a vowel usually silent is to be pronounced, in order to fit the rhythm or meter. Most often, it is applied to a word ending with -ed. For instance, the word looked is ...
11
It's simply an archaic, variant spelling. From Wikipedia:
The spelling rhyme (from original rime) was introduced at the beginning of the Modern English period, due to a learned (but etymologically incorrect) association with Greek ῥυθμός (rhythmos, rhythm).
The older spelling rime survives in Modern English as a rare alternative spelling. A ...
11
A native or expert Polish speaker is clearly what we need here! I’m not one, but my best attempt: the original has
w którym słowiczku mój a leć
and the word corresponding to trostle seems to be słowiczku, a diminutive form of słowik, which online dictionaries tell me is nightingale. The nightingale is a species of thrush (roughly — there are some ...
9
To me it looks like a combination of two modifiers: (adj noun) and (noun adj). Sometimes (for poetic reasons) adjectives are placed after the noun (this also happens with certain adjectives, such as elect in president elect). So here we have human face, which is further modified by a post-positioned adjective:
((human face) divine) => "divine human face"
...
9
Let's look at a little more context:
When the night has come and the land is dark
And the moon is the only light we see
No, I won't be afraid, oh, I won't be afraid
Just as long as you stand, stand by me
A perfect construction marks a past action as having brought about a state which is relevant at some later point: the utterance’s ‘Reference ...
8
I see two meanings here:
Lifelong partners often express a wish: let me be the first to die, meaning that life would not be worth living if the other partner were no longer around.
If a poet (Millay) outlives a friend or a lover, s/he can perform the service of memorializing the deceased — although this may come at a high price in grief and ...
8
This was homework? Apparently this doggerel ditty was published 1872 by Christina Rossetti...
city plum - rare slang for someone who possesses £100000.
statesman's rat - politician who abandons his party.
sailor's cat - braided naval whip, 'cat-o-nine-tails' or possibly a type of sailor's knot - a 'cat's paw' or 'catshank'.
soldier's frog - decorative ...
8
From pole to pole refers to the North Pole and South Pole of a planet; it means all over the world.
In Wikipedia's article on Invictus, it has a section on its meaning:
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
The first stanza depicts the speaker at night, ...
7
Ah, one of my favorite poets. Stevens uses an extensive and sometimes recondite vocabulary, but he is one of the last poets I would accuse of poor grammar.
Just remember that on and upon are synonyms, and that in this case upon is an older (not to say archaic) term used to describe the act of playing on an instrument.
7
I'm not sure what it means to be "officially recognized" in English; there is no official list of English words.
If you mean appearing in dictionaries, then yes, it is a word.
(If you mean being employed in speech or everyday writing without sounding odd, then probably not. Its use is restricted to poetry, as you acknowledge.)
7
Blithe = cheerful, carefree; and trostle = misspelling of throstle = a type of thrush = a songbird. So, given just this line, I think it's meant to be interpreted pretty literally:
in which we find [out] how blithe[ly] the [thrush] sings!
Edit: Found a different translation which clearly uses "bird" to translate the Polish word:
[...] a charade, a ...
7
The simple answer is that if Haiku is not about nature, it is called Senryu. I've heard different views on whether the Japanese definition is different than the non-Japanese ones, and whether the syllable counts can differ.
There seems to be some subjectivity on definitions, in English poetry at least. I think the following is Senryu, but you could make a ...
7
In context:
How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
The second line, in more conventional syntax:
Forgetting the world, and by the world forgotten.
This is a sentence fragment (common in poetry), and the "subject" is only in the previous line. So here, the meaning is that a "blameless vestal" (chaste ...
7
Poe's poetry isn't old enough to have these words pronounced the same (The Raven was published in 1845). It's a printer's rhyme; so, No, those words should be pronounced normally.
Whether poetry like Chaucer's should be pronounced in a Middle-English fashion, or Beowulf in Old English, is another question altogether.
6
This is a standard idiom in English. The earth here is a metaphor that symbolizes the impossible, the immoderate, or the unfulfillable:
promise (someone) the earth (or moon)NOAD
make extravagant promises to someone that are unlikely to be fulfilled:
interactive technology titillates, promises the earth, but delivers nothing
The origin of this ...
6
It would be better expressed as "Stressed" vs. "Unstressed". Take the classic limerick starter, "There once was a man from Nantucket". When you speak the line, the emphasis naturally falls onto certain syllables:
there ONCE was a MAN from nanTUCKet
which looks like
da DA da da DA da da DA da
which is a nice repeating pattern.
If you try to ...
6
I think the Norman Conquest might have had something to do with it. After 1066 Norman French was the prestige language in England for two or three centuries and was a huge influence on the subsequent development of English. It would have been surprising if it had not brought French literary practice with it. As far as I know, there is no tradition of ...
6
How is and more important than God?
GOD and my RIGHT SHALL me deFEND.
The line is two choriambs.
God and my right is a set choriambic phrase. The last four syllables can be parsed as another choriamb, as above, or as two iambs, "shall ME deFEND" (as JAM has pointed out in comments).
The phrase is translated from a Norman French phrase which is almost ...
5
Matt Ellen gives a nice answer to the question of what high means.
I would just like to comment on the interpretation of the whole sentence - in poetry, and especially free verse, the following is possible
Do not seat your love high upon a precipice - it is dangerous.
Do not seat your love upon a precipice just because it is high - and beautiful to ...
5
The poem was first published in 1798 - but even by the standards of the time, it had a lot of archaic words and spellings.
It was substantially revised by Coleridge before being republished some 20 years later, but he kept lots of archaic spellings, including rime.
I'd just say Coleridge did this for artistic effect, and leave it at that. But here's some ...
5
As a figure of speech litotes means understatement for ironic emphasis, often by denying the opposite.
Examples form Shakespeare include "not without cause" [Julius Caesar] or "we have seen better days" [As You Like It]. I would not say "signifying nothing" was an example, as Macbeth means precisely what he says about the futility of human existence.
5
No. Litotes is "a form of understatement, always deliberate and with the intention of emphasis." An example of litotes could be "not bad" (which means "good"), or "you are not wrong" (meaning "you are right"). It is principally defined by a double negative.
Signifying nothing does not include a denial of the opposite, and neither is it an ...
5
Dawn is not a synonym for realize; however, the verbal phrase dawn on could be considered synonymous.
The trick is finding a dictionary that recognizes (and lists) dawn on as an entity in its own right.
From Macmillan:
dawn on someone if something dawns on you, you realize it for the first time:
It was several months before the truth finally dawned ...
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