It's Just a Little Poem

I analyzed some of the poem, and I don’t think it follows any meter, but I do think if you changed the meter on some of the lines I pointed out that would help a lot. I don’t exactly know how to explain it. I get this sense which I’m not going to spend hours trying to prove that there is a sort of rhythm to your rhythm throughout most of the poem. In other words, each line has a meter of some sort (not that all of them follow a strict pattern, but of course they all have accented syllables and unaccented ones and that is a meter of sorts) but instead of all the lines keeping the same meter, you kind of use totally different meters in different lines in a musical sort of way. I hope that makes at least some sense.

Weather it does or not, just play it by ear. I’ll give you an example. Instead of saying, “Though the darkness falls” say something like “Though darkness may fall”. Doesn’t that sound better? That’s the thing about poetry. You’ll be writing like crazy and then you’ll come upon this one line where you know exactly what you want to say, but what you end up writing just sounds jarring and you have to completely rephrase it. You see, poetry is 25% rhyming and meter and other forms of pattern and 75% just being deft with phraseology. That might have something to do with why I love it so much. I’m a phraseology fanatic.

And I am liking Tolkien’s poetry. There are a couple shorter ones that don’t have rhyme and didn’t seem to have meter or anything else really that I could notice and they were rather flat, but they were few. For the most part he has some really great stuff. I love how he infuses poetry everywhere. I don’t think I’ve seen that before. I’m trying to do that a little but it can be harder with historical fiction I think. One thing I’m doing to compensate for this is to include a short stanza or two at the beginning of every chapter as kind of an introduction.

By the way, I think you misunderstood me a bit on the rhyming thing. I don’t work hard on my rhyming except occasionally, I will have to try hard when I want a really unusual rhyme. Rhyming just comes to me naturally. My problem then is that I have trouble rhyming too much. That is why I like sestinas so much. They don’t use rhyming but I find them very easy to write. Other than that, I’m pretty much left with meter, which I can do but I find difficult, and free verse which I like here and there, but don’t do much of.

Speaking of sestinas, they are very simple. There are seven stanzas. The first six have six lines and the seventh has three lines. In the first six stanzas you choose six words to use, one for the end of each line. Now the thing is, you must use those same six end of line words for each stanza. They are the only ones you can use. It gets a little more complicated though. You must reuse those words in a very specific order. How it works is you take the last line-end word and make it your first line-end word and make it your second. Then you take your second to last line-end word and make it your third and your second line-end word and make it your second. Finally you take your fourth line-end word and make it your fifth and your third line-end word and make it your sixth. Let me demonstrate this for the first three stanzas of a sestina.
Blah blah blah blah blah End
Blah blah blah blah blah Line
Blah blah blah blah blah Words
Blah blah blah blah blah Of
Blah blah blah blah blah First
Blah blah blah blah blah Stanza

Blah blah blah blah blah Stanza
Blah blah blah blah blah End
Blah blah blah blah blah First
Blah blah blah blah blah Line
Blah blah blah blah blah Of
Blah blah blah blah blah Words

Blah blah blah blah blah Words
Blah blah blah blah blah Stanza
Blah blah blah blah blah Of
Blah blah blah blah blah End
Blah blah blah blah blah Line
Blah blah blah blah blah First

Then you just repeat the patten until you have finished the sixth stanza. The seventh stanza is different. In the seventh stanza you have three lines. It does not matter what are your line-end words for this stanza, but you must use the line-end words from the last six stanzas somewhere in your three lines. For instance:
Blah First Words blah Stanza
Blah blah blah blah End
Line blah blah Of blah

I hope that makes sense. It’s really fun and easy actually.

Tom Bombadil was one of my favorite character, probably in the top five. He was unusual, he was a great broke of creativity, but really, he was just downright beautiful. That song he sung when he came to help the hobbits when Frodo called/sung for him was probably my favorite of all the poetry. Just beautiful. I just started book six by the way.

And I know what you mean about the sestina looking hard. I thought the same thing. It does look hard. Thankfully the trouble is only in figuring out what you are supposed to be doing. Actually writing it is easy. I’ll tell you my trick too. It may not work as well for you as it does for me, but I think it will. What I do is write all the end line words in their correct orders for all the first six stanzas. After that I go through and start writing the rest of the lines. I’m just filling in the blanks then. I’m putting on walls and floors, but I already have the structural frame.

I’ll go ahead and make one of my sestinas my next post so you can see an example of one without the 40,000,000 blahs.

That’s an awesome poem, Kate!
I think it would flow better if you changed these lines a little:
“And the sword has lost all
(Of) it’s sharpness.”
Or change “lost” into a two-syllable word.

“Be the battle ever so grim”: I would replace “battle” with a one-syllable word, like “fight”.

Does that help?

• This reply was modified 9 years ago by Sarah Hoven.

Yeah, that sounds much better. The only thing I can really pick at is the second to last line. It’s too short so it flies by you without taking its affect. All you really need is one more syllable.