The Petrarchan Sonnet

Here's a brief guide to the form of sonnet known as the Petrarchan. Of interest, perhaps, to students of poetry and the general reader.

Like many poetic forms and terms, the sonnet is Italian in origin. It was used by the fourteenth-century Italian poet Petrarch (1304-74), and introduced to England in the sixteenth century by the poets Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-42)and Surrey (full name Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, ?1517-47). They made translations of Petrarch and wrote English sonnets which employed his rhyme scheme.

Basic form

The basic shape of the Petrarchan sonnet is 8 lines (the octave or octet) + 6 lines (the sestet). The octave is composed of two quatrains, closely linked by just two rhyme sounds: abbaabba. The sestet has various rhyme forms, using either two or three rhyme sounds: cdcdcd, cde cde  etc. Many variations are permitted, but the sonnet should not end with a couplet. The English iambic pentameter line is the standard metre. In graphic form, here is the rhyme scheme of a sonnet divided into octave and a sestet, the setet itself divided into two tercets liniked by rhyme.

1. ___________ a
2. ___________ b
3. ___________ b
4. ___________ a
5. ___________ a
6. ___________ b
7. ___________ b
8. ___________ a

     9. ____________ c
     10. ___________ d
     11. ___________ c

     12. ___________ d
     13. ___________ c
     14. ___________ d

One thing to look out for in a sonnet is the turn (Italian volta), the point between the octave and sestet, where the sonnet moves from one rhyme group to another.  With the change in rhyme scheme may come a change in subject  matter.  So in the second, shorter half, the poet may change register, comment on the first half (perhaps presenting it as an analogy), answer it, resolve its tensions or heighten them, or reverse  the feeling altogether, among many other strategies.

A sonnet is a little too long for simple lyrical expression, but too short to tell a complex narrative. It therefore suits short argument, and the representation of an internal mental / emotional experience, often involving conflicting feelings.  This figuring of an internal passage of thought invites metaphorical language. Originally, the predominant theme was love, with the Petrarchan lover in joy and agony, burning and freezing at the sight of his beautiful / remote beloved. Wyatt and Surrey were courtly poets, writing about the delicate sensitivities of the courtly lover. Later writers have adopted the form for a wide range of subjects. Rhyming is harder in English than Italian, so the form also represents a formidable technical challenge to the poet. The discipline of the form seems to be an effective way of presenting strong emotional content.

Here are some examples of English sonnets using the Petrarchan form.

Wyatt

The long love that in my heart doth harbor

And in mine heart doth keep his residence,

Into my face presseth with bold pretense,

And there campeth, displaying his banner.

She that me learneth to love and to suffer,

And wills that my trust and lust's negligence

Be reined by reason, shame, and reverence,

With his hardiness taketh displeasure.

Wherewith love to the heart's forest he fleeth,

Leaving his enterprise with pain and cry,

And there him hideth and not appeareth.

What may I do when my master feareth

But in the field with him to live and die?

For good is the life ending faithfully.

Let's look at this without reference to the Italian model. It stands or falls as a poem in English, after all. I like the way it gets on with telling its story straightaway. Each line in the first quatrain tells us about a new event, an internal experience figured in imagery. 'Long love' - the length is felt through the double stress, which lengthens the vowels and gives the liquid 'l' sound its full value ('l' does seem to have an erotic feel to it: the lovely long-legged lady whiplash; Nabokov comments on this at the start of Lolita). The poet / lover is talking about love felt for a long time, and along with this temporal sense we get a spatial one: we see a long ship in harbour (inactive, frustrated). Like a royal visitor, Love takes up residence in the heart, which we might see in line 2 as a country house (nobles were supposed to keep these vast houses just in case the monarch decided to honour them by living there with the attendant swarm of court locusts; is there a passing echo of a castle keep?). But then, in lines three to four, something happens. Bored of harbouring and residing - a passive, skulking state - Love announces himself. He presses into the lover's face: he must have made some sign (A smile? A blush? A leer? Can I buy you a drink?) to the Lady. Love is out in the open, exposed, displaying his banner like an army in its camp.

Huge faux pas! The second quatrain looks at the Lady's reaction to this boldness. She's not pleased. He should have been a proper English gentleman, reserved and repressed. She has been teaching him to love in painful discretion ('to love and to suffer') int he best traditions of courtly love, where love is a debilitating illness which can drive you crazy. The phrase 'trust and lust's negligence' doesn't quite work for me: the double rhyme is an awkward jingle, and I can see how he has neglected his 'trust' (she trusted him to keep quiet), but not his lust, whatever sense of 'lust' we take (at that time it could mean vigorous and healthy). Maybe the 'r' allteration is a little overdone, too. But the great debate with Wyatt is how much this rough metre and sound is deliberate, and how much a sign of apprenticeship. we've seen how he departs from iambic opentameter right at the start with 'The long love', and the jingly-jangly sound of these lines could possibly convey some of the nervousness of the lover. We notice, anyway, that the second quatrain, like the first, is a complete sentence; but while the first quatrain had a fresh clause in each line, each with its precise verb (harbour ... keep), this has just one. The whole construction builds to that tremendous disapproval: 'taketh displeasure'.

We're now at the volta, the turning point between the octave and the sestet, and sure enough we get a dramatic development. Love, abashed at the beloved's displeasure, flees 'into the heart's forest' (giving us the millionth pun on heart and 'hart' (deer), the Elizabethan equivalent of rhyming 'love' and 'stars above'). It's a remarkable figuring forth of an internal seizure, the actual experience of turning inwards in shame. (And it reminds me of an episode of The Simpsons, in which Lisa disappoints a suitor on camera: 'Freeze it there,' says Bart. 'You can see the exact moment when his heart breaks!'). 'Pain and cry' is the image of the internal wound, the freeze frame instant where the lover gives up. Wyatt has a cdccdd rhyme going on here, making the sestet a compact merging of triple rhymes. In the last lines Love transmutes again (Love has been a ship, a royal visitor, a herald or king displaying his banner, a hunted quarry), this time into a master whom the lover, faithful servant, must follow even unto death, as Kent follows Lear. The Lover is loyal, and with this stoical virtue, huddled under the bedclothes, a pitiful wreck, he leaves us. The poem is an elaborate game of codes, all based on the court: the visitation, battle campaigns, the accepted code of practice of courtly love, the hunt, the duty of service. All translated into the poetic code of the sonnet, which puts it all togetehr in a little drama of love and rejection. What is remarkable is that through all the elaborateness, the rhymes and alliterations and witty double senses, we do feel something real going on: the poem gets at the psychology of love in a way that reaches beyond the Renaissance community of understanding: love can take over us, be a bore even. It can be martial and predatory - a ship, a herald of war - but it can be awfully embarrassing, too, and, when dismissed, takes us over in self-pity and absurd self-dramatisation. The artifice of the sonnet is a gateway to the genuine.

Milton

When I consider how my light is spent
     Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
     And that one talent which is death to hide
     Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
     My true account, lest he returning chide,
     "Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?"
     I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies: "God doth not need
     Either man's work or his own gifts: who best
     Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed
     And post o'er land and ocean without rest:
     They also serve who only stand and wait."

Wordsworth, "London, 1802"

Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:

England hath need of thee: she is a fen

Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,

Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,

Have forfeited their ancient English dower

Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;

Oh! raise us up, return to us again;

And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.

Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart;

Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:

Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,

So didst thou travel on life's common way,

In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart

The lowliest duties on herself did lay.

Amy Lowell ‘A Fixed Idea’

What torture lurks within a single thought When grown too constant, and however kind, However welcome still, the weary mind Aches with its presence. Dull remembrance taught Remembers on unceasingly; unsought The old delight is with us but to find That all recurring joy is pain refined, Become a habit, and we struggle, caught. You lie upon my heart as on a nest, Folded in peace, for you can never know How crushed I am with having you at rest Heavy upon my life. I love you so You bind my freedom from its rightful quest. In mercy lift your drooping wings and go.

Rhetoric: Some Tropes

Accompanying another post on rhetorical schemes, here is one on tropes. Where schemes deal with sentences - clauses in parallel, etc. - tropes concern the artful deviation of words from their ordinary sense. In practice, the distinction between schemes and tropes can become artificial, as there is a natural symbiosis between word and syntax. Some figures (ie zeugma) have been classified variously as scheme and trope. There are also problems in talking about the 'ordinary' use of language. There are good arguments (see Owen Barfield's wonderful book Poetic Diction) that language in its normal state is metaphorically rich, and we have to make a special effort to reduce a word ro statement to carry single precise meanings: think of the work lawyers have to do to create documents that admit of only one interpretation - it suggests they might be working against the grain of the material of language.

Metaphor and Simile

Metaphor
Twisting a word from its usual sense to create another idea. Used to form striking comparisons between two unlike things to show something they still have in common. A metaphor can occur in various parts of speech, and it does not have to take the form a=b. There's a beautiful discussion of metaphor in the film Il Postino.
This book is a monument.
The sun blessed the bright sky. The sun shouted in the laughing sky.
That news just burns me up.
I stood in the lonely field [so-called transferred epithet, where the adjective describing me - lonely - is transferred to the field. Also an instance of Ruskin's pathetic fallacy, the fallacy being to suppose that inanimate things like fields have feeling (pathos) like loneliness.]

Simile
Also a comparison between two unlike things, made explicit by a word such as 'as' or 'like'
My love is like a red, red rose.
The silence settled like snow.
He entered the room as subtly as a steam train.

Part and whole

Synecdoche
Part stands for whole; genus or adjunct suggest main idea.
A village of three hundred souls. ['soul' is a part, standing for the whole person]
Keep your vehicle roadworthy [Vehicle stands - probably - for car, a specific kind of vehicle
: genus for species]
Give us this day our daily bread [Bread for food: species for genus]
Many hands make light work.
You did this for the oldest of motives - silver [the material 'silver' stands for what is made from it]

Metonymy
Virtually the same as synecdoche. An attribute or suggestive word is used to imply what is really meant.
Let's go and buy a bottle or two for dinner.
The top brass are meeting now.
He lives by his pen.
I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.

Puns
Other ages took puns more seriously than we do. Shakespeare's plays and other Renaissance dramas has a level of wordplay that can seem puzzling to a modern audience. One way of looking at a line like Hamlet's punning 'A little more than kin and less than kind' is that it contains metaphor at its most compressed - several meanings in just one word (kind implies a comparison with 'kinned' (family-related) and 'kind' meaning species).

Antanaclasis
Word repeated in two different senses.
I want to scotch the idea that all the Scotch like Scotch.
Let's hang around while they hang Danny.
We make the traveller's lot a lot easier.

Paronomasia
Use words that sound the same but have different meanings. this is the groan groan type of pun.
I wish my parents would leave me a loan.
If you try the high stile you might look silly.
Let's have the fool for pudding.

Syllepsis
One word (usually a verb) governs two or mroe other words, though it is understood differently in each case. See zeugma, from which it is practically indistinguishable.
I take my hat and my leave.
Or stain her honour, or her new brocade.
... Dost sometimes counsel take - and sometimes tea.
His speech raised a laugh or two but also some hackles.

Figures of Substitution

Anthimeria
Substitute one part of speech for another. Several examples in late Shakespeare.
The thunder would not peace at my bidding. (noun for verb)
Lord Angelo dukes it well.
Knee thy way into his mercy.
I am going in search of the great perhaps (adverb for noun)
He wants to do the impossible (adjective for noun)
The fair, the chaste, the unexpressive she.

Periphrasis
Substitute a descriptive word or phrase for a name (eg a nickname); substitute a proper name for a quality associated with it.
Meet the mad jackal, captain of our village cricket team.
I am taught biology by the great fungus.
I like drawing, but I'm no Leonardo.
You'd need a Hercules to shift this lot.

Personification
Give abstract concepts or inanimate objects human qualities.
The ground is thirsty.
Smoke caressed the garden fence.
Fortune is cruel and arbitrary.

Apostrophe
Address to an absent person or personified abstraction: Death be not proud, Oh cruel fortune! etc.

Hyperbole
Substitute an over-the-top phrase for the real idea, to achieve emphasis.
There were millions of people at the party.
When he's angry, he makes the walls shake.
He's the King of the village hall ping-pong table.

Litotes
Opposite of hyperbole. Deliberate understatement, emphasising the point by opposite means. It's most common form is witht he negative.
That's no mean task.
I'm slightly puzzled as to why you burned the house down.
It would be rather helpful if you could throw me a rope to stop me from drowning.
I admit it's somewhat unusual to see a tree growing in someone's living room.
einstein was not unintelligent.

Rhetorical question (erotema)
Asking a question in order to make a point rather than to elicit an answer.
How many times do I have to tell you?
Isn't it odd that the murders only started after the new vicar was installed?

Irony
Using a word to signify the opposite of what it usually means. In its strong form it becomes sarcasm.
So you completely ignored the question - that was clever.
It's a privilege to be able to teach Wykehamists.
I can't wait to get the next gas bill.

Onomatopoeia
The sound of a word seems to underline its sense. Often combined with alliteration and assonance.
First march the heavy Mules, securely slow,
O'er hills, o'er Dales, o'er crags, o'er rocks they go
Jumping high o'er the shrubs of the rough ground,
Rattle the clatt'ring Cars, and the shockt Axles bound. (Pope, Iliad, 23:138-41)

Oxymoron
Joining together two words with different senses, to create a kind of self-contradiction.
Dry ice, conspicuously absent, deafening silence, cruel kindness, laborious leisure, the living dead
O miserable abundance, O beggarly riches.

Recommended Reading
Arthur Quinn and Barney R Quinn, Figures of Speech: 60 Ways to Turn a Phrase
Richard A Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms

Online
Two handy lists:
Robert A Harris, A Handbook of Rhetorical Devices
University of Kentucky, Glossary of Rhetorical Terms

More comprehensive treatment:
Gideon Young, Silva Rhetoricae

Rhetoric: Examples of Schemes

Rhetoric: the art of persuasive speech. Or perhaps we might say, the art of expressive speech, in which language is shaped, 'figured', into configurations that compel our attention. Of the hundreds of figures of speech listed in reference works, only a few (metaphor, simile, alliteration) are in regular use in literary study. Here is a list of a few others: getting acquainted with them can certainly sharpen our sense of form in writing, and that perception of form can in turn - on a good day - help us to get a precise idea of the nature of the thought being expressed, and how its formal contours give it a rhythm and emotional current.

Rhetorical figures can be divided into schemes and tropes. Put simply, schemes deal with the shape of a sentence, tropes with the use of individual words. Schemes themselves can be subdivided, as follows:

Schemes of Balance

Parallelism   Words, phrases or clauses with a similar structure:

Government of the people, by the people, for the people 
I watched television and my wife read a book [Two clauses around and: the structure of each clause is Pronoun + transitive verb + object]

Players who abuse the opposition or maim the referee will not be selected in future. [Sentence includes two parallel phrases: abuse the opposition, maim the referee, both transitive verb + object]

Parallelism can convey the effect of being composed, in mind and speech, poised, in charge of one's material. Notice the various parallel phrases and clauses in the opening of Burke's Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents:

It is an undertaking of some degree of delicacy to examine into the cause of public disorders. If a man happens not to succeed in such an enquiry, he will be thought weak and visionary; if he touches the true grievance, there is a danger that he may come near to persons of weight and consequence, who will rather be exasperated at the discovery of their errors, than thankful for the occasion of correcting them. If he should be obliged to blame the favourites of the people, he will be considered as the tool of power; if he censures those in power, he will be looked on as an instrument of faction.

One way of making clear the parts of text working in parallel is to place them in a column, to see how the elements of speech map onto each other:

If a man happens not to succeed
If he touches                                 [If + subject + verb / verbal phrase

weak and visionary
weight and consequence  [Two terms bound as a couplet, a pair of adjectives and a pair of nouns. Notice that in both pairs, a short Anglo-Saxon word is followed by a longer Latinate one]

exasperated at the discovery
thankful for the occasion  [adj + preposition + noun]

And the last sentence (or period, as Burke might have considered it) consists of two balanced sentences (If clause, main clause), themselves pivoted on a semi-colon and containing parallel constructions (the tool of power / an instrument of faction)

Isocolon
When the parallelism is exact:
The louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons.
To our right is the hard road to virtue, on our left lies the pretty path to perdition.

Antithesis
Contrasting ideas, whose relation is pointed by their position in parallel structures:
The fool thinks he is clever; the wise man knows he is ignorant.
That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.

Schemes of Unusual Word Order (Hyperbaton)

Anastrophe
Inversion of usual word order:
Slowly flows the stream
Those I fight I do not hate, those I defend I do not love.

Parenthesis
Start a sentence, then interrupt its natural flow with something else, even a complete sentence:
This crime - and I use this word deliberately - must be punished.
When he is angry - something which I am sorry to say occurs quite often - he loses all sense of proportion.

Apposition
Two things side by side, one explaining or modifying the other. (In Latin, of course, they can be some way from each other)
Ted, the village postman, has just been arrested. ['the village postman' is in apposition to 'Ted' - it saves using the relative clause ' who is the village postman']

Schemes of Omission

Ellipsis
Missing out a word or words which the reader has to 'fill in' from context.
I must to England [Obviously, 'I must go' is intended]
If you want a harder essay title, fine.
Idleness is the main vice of the young, wasted effort of the middle-aged, and despair of the old.

Asyndeton
Missing conjunctions between successive clauses.
I came, I saw, I conquered.
You were warned. You ignored this warning. You must be punished.
The teams went onto the field, the referee blew his whistle. The game had begun.

Polysyndeton
Opposite of asyndeton: lots of conjunctions.
And God said, Let there be light. And there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good.
It was cold and dark and silent and suddenly we felt very scared.
I entered the room although it was dark and atood very still but heard nothing.

Schemes of Repetition

Alliteration
Repeated initial or medial consonants. A useful sound effect:
Bruised and bloody, but not beaten.
A lovely, long, lazy summer afternoon.

Assonance
Repeated vowel sounds in stressed words, surrounded by different consonants.
An old, mad, blind, despised and dying king. [It's the 'i' sound in blind that gets repeated here]
Sing with a voice of joy.
The hard, dark path.

Anaphora
Starting successive clauses with the same word or words.
We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills.

Epistrophe
Ending successive clauses with the same word or words.
I don't like cricket. I don't play cricket. I don't want to hear another word about cricket.

Epanalepsis
Same word at beginning and end.
Blood will have blood.
Year chases year, decay pursues decay.

Anadiplosis
End a clause with a word, and begin the next clause with the same word.
Cars have parts, parts need repairs, and repairs are expensive.

Climax
Words, phrases or clauses arranged in order of increasing importance.
I serve my employer, my family, my country and my God.

Antimetabole
An ABBA structure where words are repeated in inverse order.
Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.

Chiasmus
ABBA structure where grammatical structures or parts of speech are repeated inversely.
We proceeded at night, and by day we slept.
It's easy to make friends; to lose them is difficult.

Another post will give a list of tropes and reading recommendations.

Short Guide to Poetic Metre

The following is an outline of the discipline of prosody, the study of poetic metre. It is probably the area of literary commentary where it is easiest to get bogged down in jargon, and usually a little talk of dactyls, anapaests and secondary stresses will go a long way. But equally there is no doubt that over much of the history of poetry, the concern with metre or 'numbers' has been very high indeed in the minds of readers and writers: one only has to flick through a Renaissance treatise such as Puttenham's Art of Poesie to see this concern with sound, and to get a sense that previous generations were attuned to nuances of rhythm to a degree we perhaps cannot now recapture. In any case, the basics of the matter are offered below for the bold and curious, and suggestions for other sources are added to placate the dissatisfied.

Syllables
Words in English divide into units of sound which we call syllables: win-dow, coll-ect, ten-der (2 syllables each); fasc-in-ate, cum-ber-some, dis-as-ter (3); ex-clam-a-tion, con-de-scen-ding (4) etc.

A syllable will contain at least one vowel. It may have one or more consonants accompanying it: 'coll' is a syllable consisting of consonant + vowel + consonant. ('Vowel' and 'consonant' aply here to sounds, rather than letters or characters: 'll' is two letters but one consonant sound.)

Stress
When we speak, we naturally emphasise or stress some syllables more than others: win-dow, coll-ect, ten-der, fasc-in-ate, cum-ber-some, dis-as-ter, ex-clam-a-tion, con-de-scen-ding. The stress position is not arbitrary, but subject to habits of speech sound.

Scansion
Poets compose texts in such a way that stresses are normally highly organised within verse lines and longer units. In regular metre, the arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables will fall into patterns. These patterns create a particular kind of rhythm, which can be varied and interrupted for metrical effect. The study of these patterns and effects is called, to use an old-fashioned term, prosody. Because the key feature of prosody in English is identifying which syllables carry a stress or accent, the system is called accentual-syllabic.

When we describe the metre of a line of verse, we first scan it to identify the stressed syllables. Here is the beginning of Canto 4 of Pope's The Rape of the Lock:

But anxious cares the pensive nymph oppressed,
And secret passions laboured in her breast.

When scanned, the lines look like this (capital letters indicating stress), with the syllables separated:

But ANX-ious CARES the PEN-sive NYMPH opp-RESSED  (10)
And SE-cret PASS-ions LA-boured IN her BREAST. (10)

I have used a smaller size for IN (line 2), because its stress sounds lighter than the other capitalised syllables: it carries a secondary stress (though stress has been divided into more than two grades). It is in fact a common effect that where there are five stressed syllables in a line, one will be notably weaker and take a secondary quality.
So far, we have marked line one of the extract  as having ten syllables, made up of five unstressed and five stressed, and line two as following the same pattern (with a qualification noted on 'in'). If we use the conventional symbols of / for stress and x for unstressed, we can represent this as the following sequence:

x/ x/ x/ x/ x/

This sequence is clearly ordered and not random, and its repetition in two successive lines suggests strongly it is not arbitrary. It is a pattern consisting of the x/ unit, repeated five times. With vertical lines between each unit, we see how it maps onto the line of verse:

But ANX |-ious CARES | the PEN-| sive NYMPH | opp-RESSED

A poetic line which behaves according to a regular accentual metre like this is said to scan (and scansion is another term for metre).

Feet
The basic unit of stressed and unstressed, repeated to form a pattern, is known as a foot. Metrical feet are oblivious of meaning: they correspond to groups of syllables, and words can cut across them. In traditional scansion, feet are designated with Greek words. This is far from ideal, both because Greek is today an obscure language even to most educated people, and because the Greek language works very differently from English: Greek and Latin poetry are quantitative, that is to say their syllables are long and short, and to take words used to describe this state of affairs as the tools with which to describe a different sound world where syllables are stressed or unstressed is a kind of category error. Nonetheless, the error is so long ingrained and enshrined in textbooks that it seems inescapable. And, it must be said, while the terminology is not ideal, there is still much useful work that can be done with it.

Iambic Pentameter
Pursuing Greek terms, the unit of x/ (stress unstress) is an iamb. The line from Pope we have been concentrating on has five iambs, making it a pentameter (words ending in -meter count the number of feet in the line: pentameter means 'five feet' and that is all it means). The iambic pentameter is the most common line in post-medieval English poetry, long enough to encompass interesting thoughts while remaining memorable, and at the same time anchored in the natural rhythms of speech (The pentamter functions equally well at different speech registers. Examples of colloquial pentameter: I wonder if they'll call us when he comes, I've read this thing at least a thousand times! Just text me and I'll come and pick you up). The iambic pentameter is used in many rhyming verse forms; verse in non-rhyming iambic pentameter is called blank verse (examples are Paradise Lost and most of the dramatic verse of Shakespeare).

To recap, the three stages of describing the metre of a line are:

1. Identify stressed syllables
2. Identify the basic kind of foot into which the line can be broken down
3. Count the number of feet to give the type of line (note: count the feet, not the syllables).

Here are the most common feet in English with their Greek names:
                                                         
iamb   x/  (forGIVE)
trochee  /x  (WINdow)
spondee //  (I've got BAD NEWS)
pyrrhic  xx  (MUCH of the TIME)
anapaest  xx/  (InterrUPT)
dactyl /xx  (CHARacter)

The line lengths are designated as follows:

1 foot: monometer
2 feet: dimeter
3 feet: trimeter
4 feet: tetrameter 
5 feet: pentameter
6 feet: hexameter
7 feet: septameter / fourteener

Verse lines can thus be described in terms of their feet, and the number of feet in a line:

I wonder if she's there (I WONder IF she's THERE) = iambic trimeter
How the time is running past us! (HOW the TIME is RUNNing PAST us) = trochaic tetrameter

Tetrameters and pentameters are far the most common in English verse. Mono, di, hex and sept are  rare.

Pitch
The voice usually rises in pitch when it stresses a syllable. Hence, iambs and anapaests, which end in a stress, naturally create a rising rhythm. Trochees and dactyls, which move from stressed to unstressed, create a falling rhythm. These two effects can be counterpointed to create a wave-like sensation, and prevent the iambic line from becoming noxiously jaunty. The couplet from Pope is an example. The only way to get a word like 'window' (/x) into iambic verse is to make it cross from one foot into the next (An |xious). Pope uses several such trochaic words, and the effect is to slow the verse down, creating a feeling of falling against the natural rising rhythm of the iambs. Though this aural pattern is meaningless in itself, it usefully colours the content of the line, and here perhaps helps us to imagine the mental labour and anxiety of the 'nymph', to feel her vexed sighings (though this reading may simply be an example of 'reading in' the sense of the words into their rhythmic utterance; sound effects diviorced from lexical meaning seem to have no real effect at all):

But ANX |-ious CARES | the PEN-| sive NYMPH | opp-RESSED
And SE | cret PASS | ions LA | boured IN | her BREAST.

Syntax
The second line here noticeably goes into a trochaic rhythm, to come out of it in the last foot. (Returning to the weaker 'in', we might even scan this as a pyrrhic - two unstressed syllables).
In this example, the syntax corresponds to the metre: each line contains a single grammatical sentence, linked by the conjunction 'And' at the start of line 2. Often, though, poets will set tensions between the verse line and the syntax, with sentences flowing over several lines, starting and ending mid-line, and local rhythms forcing themselves against the dominant general pattern. Milton does this constantly, and it is a characteristic feature of writers in what we may call the baroque style. But in any period it is a general effect to look out for: the sentence rhythm - the general shape and natural emphases of the sentence - will be in some kind of relationship, friendly or tense, with the verse rhythm, demarcated by individual lines. In these lines from Donne, we can hear the energies of the sentence struggling against the prim compartments of metre and line as the cosmic vision is released into words:

At the round earth's imagined corners, blow
Your trumpets, angels; and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go;
all whom the flood did, and fire shall, o'erthrow ...

Against this emotive effusion, the classical, Augustan line counters with well-bred lines of shapely poise and balance. 'To Penshurst', by Donne's contemporary Ben Jonson, celebrates the civilised qualities of the Sidney family, as enshrined in Penshurst, their country estate. We note how the good ordering of the land is represented in the orderly syntax, rhyme and metre:

Thy copse too, named of Gamage, thou hast there,
That never fails to serve thee seasoned deer
When thou wouldst feast or exercise thy friends.
The lower land, that to the river bends,
Thy sheep, thy bullocks, kine and calves do feed;
The middle ground thy mares and conies breed.

Variation
Verse lines can vary without changing their scansion. In these lines by Sir Philip Sidney, we feel the tedious ascent of the moon in the heavy tread of the iambic feet:

With how sad steps, Oh Moon, thou climb'st the skies,
How silently, and with how wan a face!

Of course the sense of the lines causes us to slow down but we notice, too, the medial pauses between phrases, and the way the words seem to drag. To stress a vowel is also to lengthen it, and this lengthening is pointed here by thickets of consonants (steps), assonance (climb'st, silently), half rhyme (Moon, wan) and sibilance coming into and out of the vowel  (skies, silently) - all maximising the time value of the syllable and bringing across the sense of effortfulness. The lines are still broadly regular, though we might hear 'sad steps' as a spondee, or on the way to one. By contrast, sense, syntax and the distribution of sounds make these lines by Donne brisker, bringing across the speaker's impatience:

Now thou hast loved me one whole day,
Tomorrow when thou leav'st, what wilt thou say.

Shakespeare offers such variations of phrasing and tempo line by line for the speaking voice, creating an awareness of flexibility against the iambic beat.

Other variations reach for the key to the iambic padlock and unlock it. A few examples will suggest the infinite effects that can be deployed:

To BE | or NOT | to BE, | THAT is | the QUES | tion.

The chief variation happens with the decisive 'That' at the start of the fourth foot. Here instead of an iamb we have a trochee, making it a trochaic substitution or inverse (back-to-front) foot. The line furthermore has 11 syllables (hendecasyllabic) rather than 10 (decasyllabic). The extra syllable at the end is a feminine ending (referring, by lamentable tradition, to its weakness) or an unstressed hyperbeat. Because it has too many syllables for an iambic pentameter, the line is hypermetrical. The effect of the inverse foot is emphasised by a caesura or hiatus indicated here (we know nothing of Shakespeare's actual punctuation) by a comma at the end of the third foot, creating a heavy pause which interrupts the rhythm. For what my intuition is worth, I doubt Shakespeare thought consciously of any of this, any more than a great jazz pianist in performance thinks verbally of chord sequences and key changes: once a craft has been thoroughly internalised, it can be pursued without such painstaking self-consciousness. It is indeed a curious effect of the kind of dissection we are attempting that it seems to attribute to artists toils of ratiocination of which they may have known nothing. But it does not follow that the observations we make of the resulting art are wrong.

Here is another example of a variation:

TYger, | TYger, | BURning | BRIGHT
IN the | FORests | OF the | NIGHT

This famous poem by Blake employs a catalectic trochaic tertameter: catalectic = one missing or 'silent' syllable, here the unstressed syllable needed at the end to complete the trochaic pattern (Tyger, Tyger, burning brightly - this is the trochaic tetrameter used in Longfellow's Hiawatha to curiously enervating effect). At the line-break, there is no punctuation. Thus the line is not end-stopped and the break constitutes a run-on, or enjambment. The effect is not necessarily to speed the verse up. Here, we have two stresses next to each other, either side of the line-break: 'burning bright / In the forests'. In fact, the enjambment creates a pause, allowing us to hold the image of the burning tiger in our minds before extending the vision into the forest.

The next example is from Shakespeare. Typically, it is open to many different readings, one reason that the plays allow for repeated productions. The line is from King Lear's famous 'Oh, reason not the need' speech:

If ON | ly to | go WARM | were GOR |ge-ous,
WHY, NA | ture NEEDS | NOT what | THOU GOR | geous WEAR'ST.

To 'save' the metre here, 'Gorgeous' has to be given its full three syllables in the first line, while it is compacted into two in the second. Similarly, words like imagination can be 5 or 6 syllables according to metrical need. In the reading I have suggested above, the second foot of line 1, 'ly to' is a pyrrhic substitution, while two feet in the second line are spondaic substitutions. The foot 'NOT what' is a now familiar trochaic inversion. The net effect is to feel the iambic current being short-circuited, bringing out a stuttering, interrupted rhythm we may associate with Lear's emotional turbulence. This kind of metrical torsion, however we may analyse it in specific instances, is characteristic of Shakespeare in his later period. Our aim as readers is not to 'solve' the line to an imagined answer, but to discover more or less plausible possibilities within the parameters of normal pronunciation (we cannot, for example, wrench an accent from its normal syllable, except when singing, where such effects are regarded as acceptable). We can pause to note, too, the importance of elements off the page: the timbre of the actor's voice, intonation, facial expression, gesture, all of which contribute vitally to our perception of the moment of these lines.

This brief outline will, I hope, provide a useful starting point for accurate metrical analysis. Prosody is not exclusively for the examination regular verse: so-called free verse will still have a carefully considered rhythmic organisation, even if it does not fit any established regular metrical form.

Considerations
When analysing metre, we can bring questions such as these to bear:
What is the basic rhythm? Where is it varied, and why? Do variations point the meaning, eg by highlighting a contrast (YOU did, not ME) or imitating the sense in some way? We should not feel compelled to harness metrical and other sound effects to an interpretation of meaning: they can be aesthetic and sensual rather than semantic in significance, creating a pattern which is decorous, balanced, symmetrical, harmonious - or spiky, jerky and nervy. Dryden would give us examples of the first, Hopkins of the second (with exceptions either way), and in both cases the acoustic properties of the verse constitute a subverbal realm which we register even if we cannot interpret it in lexical terms (we feel it, but cannot put it into words, since it is beyond words). Metre is inextricably linked to syntax, punctuation and other devices, and is to be considered as part of a total cast of effects rather than as a single actor alone on the stage. Metre will be part of the voice of the poem solemn, stately, lively, boisterous, a voice frequently moved by some internal tension, exploratory, self-dramatising. The study of metre is at the very least a reminder that poetry is written primarily for the ear, rooted in spells, chants and incantations. The technicalities of the jargon in the end return us to the pre-verbal and mysterious origins of poetry, which remain as trace elements in even its most modern printed form.

Further Reading
Online
Amittai F Aviram, Meter in English Verse
Cambridge English Faculty, Virtual Glossary of Literary Terms
Series of articles by Tina Blue

Books
James Fenton, An Introduction to English Poetry
Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form
Stephen Fry, The Ode Less Travelled
John Hollander, Rhyme's Reason - a simultaneously entertaining and instructive book which explains forms by demonstrating them.










                               

Milton's Epic Similes

This is a figure of speech particularly appropriate to epic poetry. Homer uses them extensively (they are sometimes called 'Homeric similes'), Virgil elaborated them further, and Virgil was subsequently the model for epic poetry in Western Europe. In English verse we find extended similes in Spenser's Faerie Queene (and allegory is itself a kind of ongoing simile), and they are brought to a peak of sustained sophistication by Milton. Epic similes appear throughout Paradise Lost and though each needs to be considered separately we can venture the following general remarks about them:

• Because epic similes demand careful attention they slow down our reading; and by their nature they freeze the narrative. This helps to achieve the stately pace appropriate to the gravity of epic.
• Epic similes usually describe actions rather than objects. Thus individual movements and gestures are given great emphasis and significance, again contributing to a solemn, ceremonial tone.
• They are a baroque ornamental device, which extends the range of imagery vastly beyond the immediate setting of the narrative.
• Epic similes are virtuosic, demonstrating the learning and imagination of the writer and appealing to the educated reader (indeed, they are an important part of the education of the reader: this is a traditional relation fo reader to text that we need to rememebr whenever we put ourselves in the position of analyst).
• Epic similes relate to action, character and theme by amplifying significant aspects of what they describe. For example, Satan in Hell is like a sea monster not just because he is big, but also because he is destructive. By comparing events in the immediate narrative to later history Milton also collapses chronology and implies the universal relevance of his subject matter.

Here is a discussion of the epic simile at work in a passage from Book III (lines 430-441).

Here walked the Fiend at large in spacious field.
As when a vulture on Imaus bred,
Whose snowy ridge the roving Tartar bounds,
Dislodging from a region scarce of prey
To gorge the flesh of lambs or yeanling kids
On hills where flocks are fed, flies toward the springs
Of Ganges or Hydaspes, Indian streams;
But in his way lights on the barren plains
Of Sericana, where Chineses drive
With sails and wind their cany wagons light:
So on this windy sea of land, the Fiend
Walked up and down alone bent on his prey ...

As we know, a simile compares a to b. So we may begin by asking, what is being compared to what here? With an epic simile, we should look for an action rather than a thing. The action being described here is walked (line 1 of passage) - this is known as the control, or tenor of the simile. The action walked is compared to the journey of the vulture, which is the vehicle.

Characteristically, the action in the simile is extended, becoming a mini-narrative concentrically enfolded by the episode and the larger narrative schemes beyond: the vulture starts in a rugged, hostile place (Imaus) and leaves this place with little food ('scarce of prey') to seek prey in the more fertile lands of India; but on the way he comes to the barren Chinese desert. Each detail of this 'story' is a precisely chosen point of comparison, as we can see by thinking of it like this:

Vehicle: Tenor
Vulture is a bird of prey: Satan is destructive, a predatory enemy of man.
Vulture (V) is looking for prey: Satan (S) is actively seeking out man to corrupt him.
V starts in Imaus (hostile): S starts in Hell.
V bound in by Tartary (Siberia): S's Inferno -'Tartarus' means 'infernal region' in classical epic.
V scents its prey from a great distance (17th c. belief): Satan's evil intelligence leads him to man.
V flies: S has flown to earth
V wants to gorge lambs and kids: S wants to corrupt innocence (lamb symbolic of purity, Christ)
V seeks a mild, fertile place: S seeks Eden
V lands midway in the desert: S has arrived in a wilderness on his way to Eden.
Chinese desert is 'sea on land', the confusion of elements: Satan brings confusion to earth.

Each detail in the simile goes beyond visual vividness to tell us something about Satan. In the course of the epic simile, the physical world reveals its property as an infinite store of symbols, pointing us to the inner meaning of the cosmos. There is still another level of meaning achieved through the use of allusion (echoing another text). Walked seems a surprisingly everyday verb to build the whole simile on, but its force is greatly increased if we reflect on the reference to Job I.7:

And the Lord said unto Satan, Whence comest thou? then Satan answered the Lord, and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down on it.

The first temptation of man is thus linked to the Old Testament testing of Job: by extension, Adam and Job are Everyman, in continual danger from his restless, roving enemy. There is a further possible allusion in the reference to Tartarus: it was Genghis Khan who broke Tartary's bounds to lead his destructive hordes westwards.

The pedagogical function of the lines depends for its efficacy on the pleasurable exercise it gives the reader's imagination: we have been taken on an exhilarating inner journey through the landscapes of Tartary, India and China (and, as with any epic simile, there is the demand to hold the story in our minds while we read the simile, and then return to it). Intellectually, the passage has taken us into areas such as the bible, history, higher learning and popular belief. The ornamental surface carries an abstract thematic depth.

Rhyme in Poetry

The following notes concern the uses of rhyme in poetry. As with all poetic devices, the purpose in commentary is not only to say what kind of rhyme is being employed, but to suggest some ideas on why and how it is used, and to what effect - that is, we aim to move from identification to interpretation.

1.   Rhyme is the coincidence of sounds. It is principally an aural effect, but it can often be swiftly spotted by the eye, and so can serve as a visual aid to the formal structure of a poem. Rhyme can be subdivided into various types.

Full (or perfect) rhyme: the last stressed vowel sound and the sounds following it are identical. There are two kinds:

Stressed (or masculine) rhyme occurs when the stressed vowel is on the last metrical beat of a line, as in the ent sound of the following:

Forget not yet the tried intent
Of such a truth as I have meant,
My great travail so gladly spent
      Forget not yet. 
                                            (Sir Thomas Wyatt)


Unstressed (or feminine) rhyme occurs when one or more unstressed syllables follow the final stressed syllable: clueless, shoeless; Hannibal the cannibal; starting, parting. The following quatrain alternates masculine and feminine rhymes:


The time is come, I must depart
    from thee, ah famous city;
I never yet to rue my smart,
    did find that thou had'st pity.  (Isabella Whitney)


Half rhyme (also known as slant rhyme): either vowel sound or consonants rhyme, but not both.

• Vowel rhyme (assonance): vowels rhyme, consonants don't: moon, food; sun, rut; cart, path.
• Pararhyme: vowel sounds differ, final consonants coincide.

Partial rhymes (yet another term for half rhymes) are particularly frequent in poetry from the earliest twentieth century onwards. They allow for a range of effects, building up a pattern of subtle echoes rather than the heavy and predictable repetitions which are always a risk in full rhyme. The First World War poet Wilfred Owen makes extensive use of pararhyme (see his 'Strange Meeting', for example). The opening lines from 'Insensibility' below also include a vowel rhyme (lines 3-4) an internal rhyme (before, sore) and other repetitions threaded across the lines (the 'a' sound in Happy, compassion and alleys). These acoustic effects heighten the verse to the level of a dignified incantation, in tension with the bitterness of the thought (it is better in war not to feel anything):

Happy are men who yet before they are killed

Can let their veins run cold.

Whom no compassion fleers    [mocks

Or makes their feet

Sore on the alleys cobbled with their brothers.

The front line withers.

The first lines of W B Yeats's 'Easter 1916' play full rhyme and partial rhyme against each other. In line 4, the half rhyme works with a braking metrical effect to slow the short lines down to a meditative register of thought:


I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.


Eye Rhyme (or printer's rhyme). Rhyme is harder in English than, say, Italian, where words with masculine or feminine endings offer far more possibilities for end rhyme (and make the rhyme, when it comes, less of a sensation). Poetic license in English verse thus allows the poet to rhyme words which look as if they rhyme, even if the sound is different: bough, enough; power, lower; hour, four. To complicate matters, some words which look like eye rhymes now might have been perfect rhymes in the writer's time, or in the writer's particular accent. Shakespeare could rhyme past and waste, and Wordsworth famously rhymes water with matter (in 'The Leech Gatherer'). In 'Adonais', Shelley sets himself the task of a quadruple rhyme on the b sound, and we may consider the resulting variety as a mix of perfect rhyme, half rhyme and eye rhyme:


I weep for Adonais-he is dead!
O, weep for Adonais! though our tears
Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head!
And thou, sad Hour, selected from all years
To mourn our loss, rouse thy obscure compeers,
And teach them thine own sorrow, say: "With me
Died Adonais; till the Future dares
Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be
An echo and a light unto eternity!"


Where wert thou, mighty Mother, when he lay,
When thy Son lay, pierced by the shaft which flies
In darkness? where was lorn Urania
When Adonais died? With veiled eyes,
Mid listening Echoes, in her Paradise
She sate, while one, with soft enamoured breath,
Rekindled all the fading melodies
With which, like flowers that mock the corse beneath,
He had adorned and hid the coming bulk of death.


2.  The terms full rhyme, half rhyme and eye rhyme described above refer to the type of rhyme. We should also note the position of the rhyme: an end rhyme occurs, unsurprisingly, at the end of the line. When end rhyme appears in lines which are themselves end-stopped, there is a dramatic sense of closure (see lines 1 and 3 of the extract from Shelley above). an internal rhyme occurs when at least one of the rhyming words is in a medial position, rhyming with another medial word or an end word.


3. Rhyme normally falls into patterns which are classified as schemes. The most common are:


Couplet: lines rhyme aabb etc. Couplets are closed when they present self-contained statements,a nd open when we have to read on from the second line to complete the sense. Dryden and Pope made extensive and sophisticated use of couplets - called 'heroic couplets' in the late seventeenth century because they frequently appeared in heroic, that is, epic verse. Consider the opening of Dryden's 'Absalom and Achitophel':

In pious times, e'r Priest-craft did begin,
Before Polygamy was made a sin;
When man, on many, multiply'd his kind,
E'r one to one was, cursedly, confind:
When Nature prompted, and no law deny'd
Promiscuous use of Concubine and Bride;
Then, Israel's monarch, after Heaven's own heart,
His vigorous warmth did, variously, impart
To Wives and Slaves; and, wide as his command,
Scatter'd his maker's Image through the Land.

The poem is a political satire, our appreciation of which depends on recognition of figures from the poet's own time. Hence it makes little sense in a practical critical exercise, ripped away from its sense-making context. Still, on a purely formal level we can appreciate how the closed couplets form a tension with the syntax: the first six lines enclose three sub-clauses, and while we want to read on to see how the sentence will resolve into a main clause (which it does, on the word Then), at the same time the perfectly formed couplets arrest our attention and act as a counterpoint to this forward momentum. We notice, too, how the open couplet ending 'did variously impart / To wives and slaves' enacts the promiscuous sexual activity which is being euphemistically described here. The writing,  flows freely, so to speak,  from one line into the next, and the vigour of the action carries us into the caesura after 'Slaves'. In the last couplet, command sits at the end of the line, the comma enforcing a brief suspenseful moment before the verb 'Scatter'd' (emphasised by a the trochaic inversion) appears as a wonderful and bawdy comic relief. Other masters of the couplet form include including Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, George Crabbe and Jonathan Swift.

Cross-rhyme consists of patterns such as abab cdcd, and frequently appears in the form of quatrains:

I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.  (Blake, 'London')


Blake here typically picks up a form associated with hymn and nursery rhyme and uses it as the vehicle for intense and caustic castigation of moral corruption.

Arch-rhyme consists of the pattern abba, with the a sound acting like an arch enclosing the central couplet. Perhaps the most famous sustained example is Tennyson's In Memoriam:


I held it truth, with him who sings
   To one clear harp in divers tones,
   That men may rise on stepping-stones
Of their dead selves to higher things.

Single rhyme schemes denote a form with only one set of rhyming lines: abac, aba cdc, abcb etc. Single rhymes are common in ballads and other verse in the folk tradition, like 'The Cuckoo':


Cuckoo, The

The cuckoo is a pretty bird,
She sings as she flies;
She bringeth good tidings,
She telleth no lies;
She sucketh sweet flowers
To keep her voice clear,
And when she sings Cuckoo,
The summer draweth near.

O meeting is a pleasure
And parting is a grief;
An inconstant lover
Is worse than a thief;
A thief can but rob me
Of all that I have,
But an inconstant lover,
Will bring me to the grave.

The grave it will receive me
And bring me to dust.
An inconstant lover
No maiden can trust;
He'll court you, cajole you
Poor maids to deceive;
There is not one in twenty
A maiden can believe.

Come all you sweet maidens
Wherever you be,
Your hearts - do not hang them
On a sycamore tree.
The leaf it will wither,
The root will decay;
Alack! I'm foresaken
And wasting away.

Because songs already have the unifying elements of music, they have less need for internal acoustic patterns. The lack of a secondary rhyme perhaps gives still more weight to the mono b rhyme in each stanza.


Rhyme and Reason


Each rhyming poem we read will give rise to particular questions. Those below illustrate the kinds of enquiry that careful reading may prompt:


Rhyme schemes like those above create different expectations in the reader: in an arch scheme, for example, the final a rhyme can even come as something of a surprise, as the a sound may have drifted out of view and a new idea taken over our attention. How does a writer exploit, satisfy, or subvert the psychological experience of the chosen rhyme scheme?


How emphatic are the rhyme words? Does the rhyming word carry the principal meaning of the line, or lead us towards / away from it? Is it made prominent by metre, syntax, punctuation?


Continuing from the last question, is the poet countering a sense of finality which a rhyme creates by stretching the syntax across lines, creating marked mid-line pauses etc.?


Has the poet tried to make the rhyme sounds less emphatic? If so, what diversionary tactics has she used?


Is the rhyme word predictable or surprising? Does it surprise or satisfy our expectations?


Rhyme is often present in notionally non-rhyming poetry, such as blank verse (Paradise Lost) or modern free verse. There is no obligation for rhyme to be regular: a poem by T S Eliot, for example, may dip in and out of rhyme as part of its story.


Further resources:


Online guide to rhyme in poetry


Alberto Rios, Glossary of Rhymes


Books which discuss rhyme with particular care include John Leonard, The Poetry Handbook and Stephen Fry, The Ode Less Travelled. A glossary for reference is essential. Recommended: J A Cuddon, A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory; M H Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms.

Close Reading of Poetry

Close reading at its best is reading with a careful scrutiny of what Cleanth Brooks called the 'well-wrought urn' of the poem. It involves a quasi-religious attention to the text and the ways we respond to it. The close reader practises becoming attuned to the meanings and energies released by the content and form of each individual poem, and is rewarded, on a good day, with a feeling akin to exaltation: the flexion of these mental muscles releases us from our usual routines of processing language and reminds us of the full spectrum of thoughts and feelings of which we are capable, but which are usually smothered by a culture that promotes emotional and intellectual inarticulacy.  On a bad day, close reading is a dry-as-dust pseudo-scientific analysis of the formal aspects of a poem, paying no attention to what a text might be saying to us, or how we respond to it on a personal level. Reading, like writing, traverses a tightrope between richness on one side and redundancy on the other. Anyway, for those who wish - or find themselves obliged - to pay some close attention to poetry, here are a few recommendations. For browsing and selecting.

Reading
First and foremost, we have to read poetry until it feels like a normal thing to do. Classroom analysis can lead us to think that every poem has to be laboured over, line by line, which makes any anthology seem intimidating. Reading at a normal speaking rate is probably about right. We can 'let a poem go' even if we feel we haven't extracted every bit of its juice, and come back to it later if we wish (it's not going to go anywhere).

As a way of getting into poetry, and making the whole enterprise seem important on a personal level, the anthologies by Neil Astley of Bloodaxe Books, have had a phenomenal success. In order: Staying Alive, Being Alive and Being Human.

Then we have to learn to read historically, to understand what we can expect from a seventeenth-century religious meditation or an Augustan satire, and what we need to bring to that meeting. The fullest single-volume anthology of English poetry that I know is the Norton Anthology of Poetry, and the accompanying Teaching with the Norton Anthology of Poetry covers aspects from versification to genre and form. That's unfortunately out of print, but Furniss and Bath, Reading Poetry: an Introduction is not. Downsides to the Norton book: it's massive, expensive and the paper is very thin. None of which can be said against the excellent website, which is a whole course in itself.

For other anthologies, the thing is to browse around and find a couple that feel right.

Introductions to Poetry
There are many books introducing us to poetry and the skills of reading it. Here are a few personal recommendations.

James Fenton, An Introduction to English Poetry. Mostly on metre and other formal properties and their importance, which Fenton explains and illustrated very clearly.

Stephen Fry, The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within. Versification and form followed to arcane recesses, with lively guidance from a national treasure. Exercises for the apprentice craftsman.

John Lennard, The Poetry Handbook is an engaging book. Lennard covers the central features of poetic language and form, and has an unusual amount to say about punctuation, telling us along the way about printer's terms like 'leading' (the space between lines).

Barry Spurr, Studying Poetry is a dull title for a consistently interesting book. Unlike Fenton and Lennard, Spurr organises his book according to historical periods, with example readings and exercises.

Peck and Coyle, Practical Criticism, covers prose and drama as well as poetry. It is aimed squarely at students facing an exam, and offers a very helpful methodical approach to the discipline. I like their advice to look for any implicit tension in a text. Lindy Miller, Practical Criticism also concentrates on building up skills to tackle essays and exams. My own Mastering the Language of Literature takes a more linguistic approach to the topic: more on syntax than some other guides, less on verse forms.

There are many others out there. There's a post in the early days of this blog on Eagleton, How to Read a Poem. It's a valuable book, but I'm not sure it's an ideal introduction. I couldn't get much from Tom Paulin, The Secret Life of Poems, but others may see what I'm missing. The classic  books by I A Richards (Practical Criticism, 1929) and William Empson (Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1930) lie slightly outside the scope of this post, but preside over everything on it.

Examples of Readings
A little method goes a long way. Just as we can learn how to play a game from watching it, so there is much to be learned from reading good examples of poetry reading. I like Ruth Padel's two books, which take us through individual poems: 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem and The Poem and the Journey. Lionel Trilling, Prefaces to the Experience of Literature is a venerable older book.

Online
Some siftings from the net. There should be something here to stimulate all tastes.

Norton poetry website (as above)

For a basic intro, see the short guide by Nicholas Marsh on Palgrave Skills4Study site

Carol Rumens Poem of the Week is published on the Guardian website. Interesting choices, thoughtful readings  and a lively discussion thread.

Introduction to Practical Criticism by Cambridge English Faculty explains what Practical Criticism is and has a couple of lessons.

Tips on Practical Criticism, for Students of English, by J H Prynne. Produced for students at Caius College, Cambridge and posted online. Prynne is regarded by many as one of our leading poets. Once you get past the administrative stuff about the Tripos this is an extremely stimulating account of poetics and the reading experience.

Edward Hirsch, How to Read a Poem, published by the Poetry Foundation.

And a different How to Read a Poem on the American site Poets.org

Short Guide

Finally, an old handout which I wrote years ago, Close Reading of Poetry: An Introduction: