Poetry; A little about Poetry

THIS IS NOT POETRY WEDNESDAY

I’m quite sure I’ve mentioned before how little I know about poetry but also how much I’ve enjoyed the few contributions I’ve made recently to ‘Poetry Wednesday’. Since there is no ‘official’  Poetry Wednesday this week; it occurred to me I could take this opportunity to do a couple of things vaguely connected to poetry but not exactly covered by the remit of ‘Poetry Wednesday’. One thing I have wanted to do is to find out a little more about the technical terms used in discussion of poetry, and the other is to return to my all time favourite pastime of introducing painting to any given subject, in this instance Poetry…………………….

I would like to start with a painting

‘Una and the Lion’, 1860, William Scott Bell

This painting can be seen in the National gallery of Scotland. It was inspired by Edmund Spencer’s sixteenth-century poem ‘The Faerie Queen’. This poem tell the story of Una, the beautiful young daughter of a king and queen who have been imprisoned by a ferocious dragon. Una undertakes the  quest to free her parents,  on her travels she encounters a fierce lion. The lion is so utterly captivated by Una’s innocence and beauty he abandons his plan to eat her, and vows instead to become her protector and companion. This painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1860, but Scott returned to the picture much later in his life and retouched various parts, including Una’s face and dress.

 So much for the painting now on to the poem;
The Faerie Queene is an English epic poem by Edmund Spenser, first published first in three books in 1590, and later in 1596 in six books.

Now for the technical bit…..……This was the first work written in Spenserian stanza. The Spenserian stanza is a fixed verse form invented by Edmund Spenser for his epic poem ‘The Faerie Queene’. Spenser intended this poem to be many thousands of Spenserian stanzas, hence its 'epic' name, but he died before even 1/4 of his goal was completed. Each stanza contains nine lines in total: eight lines in iambic pentameter followed by a single 'Alexandrine' line in iambic hexameter. The rhyme scheme of these lines is "ababbcbcc." This form was used by Robert Burns in his poem "The Cotter's Saturday Night" showing Burn’s his ability to use English forms while praising Scotland.

Spenser's verse form fell into disuse in the period after his death.BUT, it was revived in the 1800s by Lord Byron in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, (which I touched on in an earlier blog), by John Keats for The Eve of St. Agnes, by Percy Bysshe Shelley for The Revolt of Islam and Adonais and by Sir Walter Scott for The Vision of Don Roderick.

 Spenserian stanza

http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Terms/rhyme.html

 Rhyme is the similarity in sound of the ends of words: the last stressed syllable and the following unstressed syllables (if any). Rhyme is usually a structuring device in verse. Of course not all poetry rhymes: classical Greek and Latin poetry never rhyme, for instance. When rhyming verses are arranged into stanzas, we can identify the rhyme scheme by assigning letters each rhyme, beginning with a and proceeding through the alphabet. Couplets, for instance — such as Pope's

  'Tis hard to say, if greater want of skill

    Appear in writing, or in judging ill;

    But of the two, much greater is th' offence

    To tire the patience, than mislead the sense

— rhyme aa bb, and so on -- a represents the ill sound, b represents the ence sound. A quatrain such as

   Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife,

    Their sober wishes never learned to stray;

    Along the cool sequestered vale of life

    They kept the noiseless tenor of their way

 is said to rhyme abab, where a represents ife, and b represents ay. More complicated patterns can be described the same way: the sonnet, for instance, can be abab cdcd efef gg or abba abba cdecde;

 the Spenserian stanza rhymes ababbcbcc.

iambic pentameter

http://shakespeare.about.com/od/faqshakespearesworks/f/iambic.htm

Question: What is iambic pentameter?

Answer: Shakespeare’s sonnets are written predominantly in a meter called iambic pentameter, a rhyme scheme in which each sonnet line consists of ten syllables. The syllables are divided into five pairs called iambs or iambic feet.

An iamb is a metrical unit made up of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable. An example of an iamb would be good BYE. A line of iambic pentameter flows like this:

 baBOOM / baBOOM / baBOOM / baBOOM / baBOOM.

Alexandrine

From Wikipedia,

 An alexandrine is a line of poetic meter comprising 12 syllables. Alexandrines are common in the German literature of the Baroque period and in French poetry of the early modern and modern periods. Drama in English often used alexandrines before Marlowe and Shakespeare, by whom it was supplanted by iambic pentameter (5-foot verse). In non-Anglo-Saxon or French contexts, the term dodecasyllable is often used.

 iambic hexameter

 http://www.geocities.com/red_writing2/hexa.html

Iambic hexameter is a way of positioning the sounds of syllables in a rhythmical pattern. It sounds almost like a drum. The rhythm goes like bomBOM bomBOM bomBOM bomBOM bomBOM. Say the following sentence out loud.

"To think how they may ache in icy hoods and mails"

-John Keats

The Eve of St. Agnes

 In iambic hexameter, there are 6 stressed syllables per line.

1. to-think

2. how-they

3. may-ache

4. in-ice

5. ey-hoods

6. and-mails

Even if no one else bothers to read this bit I’m glad for my own sake I did this little bit of research and clarified for myself some of the terms used in the discussion of poetry.

AND NOW BACK TO THE PAINTINGS

And now to return to the paintings; ‘Una and the Lion’, is only one of many paintings inspired by poetry. The Lady of Shalott is an 1888 oil-on-canvas painting by the English Pre-Raphaelite painter John William Waterhouse. The work is a representation of a scene from Lord Alfred Tennyson's 1832 poem of the same name in which the poet describes the plight of a young woman who yearned with love for the knight Sir Lancelot while isolated under a curse in a tower near King Arthur's Camelot.  

From part IV of Tennyson's poem:

"And down the river's dim expanse

Like some bold seer in a trance,

Seeing all his own mischance—

With glassy countenance

Did she look to Camelot.

And at the closing of the day

She loosed the chain, and down she lay;

The broad stream bore her far away,

The Lady of Shalott.

Lord Alfred Tennyson’s ‘Lady of Shallot’  inspired many different interpretations by different artists.

There was;

 ‘’I Am Half-Sick of Shadows’’, Said the Lady of Shalott

another by John William Waterhouse, 1849-1917

And ‘The Lady of Shalott’,

 William Holman Hunt

There are also paintings based on ‘

La Belle Dame Sans Merci’,  by John Keats.

John William Waterhouse

British, 1849 - 1917

La Belle Dame Sans Merci

Date: 1893

Sir Frank Dicksee,

British, 1853 – 1928,

La Belle Dame Sans Merci,

Date: circa 1902,

Frank Cadogan Cowper

British, 1877 - 1958

La Belle Dame sans Merci

Date 1926 

Frank Cadogan Cowper

British, 1877 - 1958

La Belle Dame sans Merci

Date: 1905,

This is just one of the many inspired by Byron.

Ford Madox Brown

British, 1821 - 1893

The Finding of Don Juan by Haidee

 ok thats it..........................hope you enjoyed it !

Add a Comment

delete reply carldecs wrote on Sep 16, '08 It's good to review the rules of poetry making which modern so-called "poets" ignore or don't bother to follow, particularly rhyming. The modern poems are more like prose paragraphs, cut into lines to pass for "poetry".

edit delete reply forgetmenot525 wrote on Aug 27, '08 Bennett if you learned this in school you were luckier than I was. I knew nothing of these things and didn't understand when terms such as 'stanza' and 'iambic' were used, which is why I had to look them up. I have no idea if this sort of thing is taught in school now, I just used the search engine to find the stuff written here. Like I said, even if no one else bothered to read it, it was a very worthwhile exercise for me to find out these things.

delete reply starfishred wrote on Aug 26, '08 all wonderful thanks so much for the neat lecture wonderful

delete reply bennett1 wrote on Aug 26, '08 Robert frost's "Stopping by a Wood..." has the usual rhyme aaba, bbcb, ccdc, and so forth. I was fascinated by that.

delete reply bennett1 wrote on Aug 26, '08 I studied verse, rhyme and meter in high school and very much enjoyed the order it put into the words that poets used. I don't know that they teach it anymore and that is too bad. Thank you for reminding me of some of the lovelier days of my youth.

delete reply vickiecollins wrote on Aug 26, '08 Very nice pictures...and I am sure many of us could benefit from reading your educational writting about poetry. http://vickiecollins.multiply.com/journal/item/454/Poetry_Wednesday_Meaves_Sorrowful_Way_Home

delete reply edtrain5 wrote on Aug 26, '08, edited on Aug 26, '08 Beautifully done, my friend.... as usual.. Solid research and a well written presentation. Thanks... (((S)))

delete reply veryfrank wrote on Aug 26, '08 Just wonderful. I didn't even think about a favorite, they are all marvelous. Thank you.

delete reply sanssouciblogs wrote on Aug 26, '08 GORGEOUS! Just popping my head in for a short visit and shall return. Beautiful!

delete reply msowens1 wrote on Aug 26, '08 it may not be poetry Wednesday.. but it feels like art Sunday.... those paintings are beautiful... and thank for all this info... I would never really know where to go about looking for amazing information, but it's like a delectable desert to have this handed to me by your blogs.....

edit delete reply forgetmenot525 wrote on Aug 26, '08 OPPS.......................thanks Brenda, typo error corrected, you are of course right, 1926 not 1826..TY

edit delete reply forgetmenot525 wrote on Aug 26, '08 thank you, thank you, thank you....................blushing madly

delete reply greenwytch wrote on Aug 26, '08 *STANDING OVATION* absolutely wonderful, brilliantly done and thoughtfully presented. THANK YOU.