POETRY

Poetry is distilled, inspired language. It is the expression or delicate suggestion of a person's creative intuition, perception, vision, or emotion in specially crafted language. Poetry lends itself more easily than prose to a certain fineness and refinement of feeling and to the communication of beauty and universal truth in abbreviated imaginative form.

A poem has certain elements - though content, emotional content, imaginative content, and form. Every poem has crystallized ideas or concepts waiting to be reflected upon, mulled over, analyzed, interpreted, and evaluated. it contains inbuilt ideas, and these ideas can beget other ideas, for a poem is organic. The poet's ideas usually converge around one main message - the theme of the poem.

Besides the intellectual element, there is the dimension of feelings and emotions evoked by the poet, feelings of love, awe, anger, melancholy, joy, wonder, despair, anguish, hope, or gratitude. The emotional content exists because a poem is a revelation of human life experiences. It can sometimes mean the baring of a soul.

Since a poem is specially crafted language, the poet deliberately and consciously projects concrete images to bring out his controlling purpose. One can easily visualize, for example, Wordsworth's " Splendor in the grass and clouds of trailing glory." The poet's craftsmanship in projecting the world images embedded in his poem; his skill in the art of word painting; his artistic mastery of figures of speech of onomatopoeia, simile, metaphor, personification, alliteration, assonance, consonance, apostrophe, synecdohe, metonymy, kenning, allusion, hyperbole, and analogy; his appeal to the reader's senses of sight, hearing, touch, and smell; his use of symbolism can be appreciated.

Lastly, a poem has technical form. It has rhythm, and it can also have rhyme. It can have the lilting jingle of a nursery rhyme; the singsong quality of a ballad; the formal cadence of epic; he brevity of a couplet; the compression of a haiku; the lingering music of a lyric; the rustic note to a pastoral poem; the exalted tone of an ode; the somber mood of an elegy; the haunting refrain of a ballade; the measured lines of a quatrain, a terza rima, or a sonnet; the rhymelessness of blank verse, and the relative freedom of free verse. A poem can manifest iambic, anapestic, dactylic, trochaic, and spondaic feet, and its lines may range from monometers to heptameters. The craftsmanship of the poet makes use of form ( of meter, line, foot, stanza, rhyme, punctuation, pauses, poem type, and format) to enhance the other elements of his poem for a total effect.

A poem is though out, felt, visualized, and crafted. It is a truly work of art.

There Is No Frigate Like a Book

Emily Dickinson

There is no frigate like a book
To take us lands away,
Nor any coursers like a page
Of prancing poetry.
This traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of toll;
How frugal is the chariot
That bears a human soul!

 

The Road Not Taken

Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference. 

 

Richard Cory

Edwin Arlington Robinson  

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean-favoured and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good Morning!" and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich, yes, richer than a king,
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine -- we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked and waited for the light,
And went without the meat and cursed the bread,
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet in his head.   

 

Simplicity
Author: Emily Dickinson

 How happy is the little stone
That rambles in the road alone,
And does n't care about careers,
And exigencies never fears;
Whose coat of elemental brown
A passing universe put on;
And independent as the sun,
Associates or glows alone,
Fulfilling absolute decree
In casual simplicity. 

QUERIDA

Angela Manalang Gloria

The door is closed, the curtains drawn within
One room, a brilliant question mark of light...
Outside her gate an empty limousine
Waits in the brimming emptiness of night.
Old Maid Walking on a City Street* (1950)

She had a way of walking through concupiscence
And past the graces her fingers never twirled:
Because her mind refused the heavy burden,
Her broad feet shovelled up the world.