Exercise: As there are lots of similarities between the devices alliteration, assonance, and consonance, it would be a good idea to give the students opportunities to practice distinguishing between them. A good exercise to achieve this is to have them first identify examples of each device from a verse in a poetry anthology, before challenging them to come up with original examples of each on their own.
The students can then use the examples they have identified as models to create their own. Meaning: Onomatopoeia refers to the process of creating words that sound like the very thing they refer to. For many students, the first introduction to onomatopoeia goes back to learning animal sounds as an infant.
Words such as Oink! Be sure to examine these elements of poetry with your younger students first. Example: Aside from animal noises, the names of sounds themselves are often onomatopoeic, for example:. Exercise: Encourage students to coin new onomatopoeic words. Instruct them to sit in silence for a few minutes. They should pay close attention to all the sounds they can hear in the environment.
When the time is up, have the students quickly jot down all the noises they heard. They should then come up with an onomatopoeic word for each of the different sounds. As an extension, they could then try to use their freshly-minted words in sentences. Meaning: Rhyme refers to the repetition of sounds in a poem. Various types of rhyme are possible, however in English we usually use the term rhyme to refer to the repetition of the final sounds in a line, or end rhyme.
Letters are often used to denote a rhyme scheme. A new letter is ascribed to each of the different sounds.
For example, in the following example the rhyme scheme is described as ABAB. Exercise: Even though a lot of modern poetry no longer follows a strict rhyme scheme, it is still helpful for students to be able to recognize various rhyming patterns in poetry. A good way for them to gain more experience with rhyme schemes is to give them copies of several different poems and ask them to describe the rhyme scheme using letters e.
Once they have completed this task, they can then be challenged to write a stanza or two of poetry employing each rhyme scheme identified. Meaning: Rhythm in poetry involves sound patterning. This involves the combining of stressed and unstressed syllables to create a constant beat pattern that runs throughout the poem. Each pattern of beats is called a foot. There are various possible combinations of stressed and unstressed syllables, or feet, and these patterns have their own names to describe them.
While it is impossible to explore all of these in this article, we take a look at one of the more common ones below. Exercise: A useful way of tuning in students to meter is to have them mark the stressed and unstressed syllables in a line of poetry.
The iambic pentameter is a good place to start. Once students have become adept at recognizing various meters and rhythms, they should have a go at writing in them too. Meaning: Metaphors make comparisons between things by stating that one thing literally is something else.
Metaphors are used to bring clarity to ideas by forming connections. Often, metaphors reveal implicit similarities between two things or concepts.
Example: We can find lots of examples of metaphors in our everyday speech, for example:. Exercise: When students can comfortably identify metaphors in the poems of others, they should try their hands at creating their own metaphors.
A good place to start is by challenging them to convert some similes into metaphors. Not only does this give students valuable practice in creating metaphors, it helps reinforce their understanding of the differences between metaphors and similes while giving them a scaffold to support their first attempts at producing metaphors themselves.
Meaning: Unlike metaphors that make comparisons by saying one thing is something else, similes work by saying something is similar to something else. They commonly come in two forms. Meaning: Personification is a particular type of metaphor where a non-human thing or idea is ascribed human qualities or abilities. This can be in the form of a single phrase or line, or extended in the form of a stanza or the whole poem.
Exercise: To help students practice distinguishing between metaphors, similes, and personification, gather a list of jumbled up examples of each from various poems. Students can then sort these accordingly. When they have completed this, task them to come with an original example of each. The elements of poetry are many and while the elements explored above represent the most important of these, it is not an exhaustive list of every element.
It takes lots of exposure for students to become comfortable recognizing each and confident employing these elements in their own writing. Take every opportunity to reinforce student understanding of these elements.
Poetic elements are often employed in genres outside of poetry such as in stories, advertising, and song — waste no opportunity! Your students will love this day Poetry Matrix to challenge their understanding of and ability to write great poetry. Learn the 7 best forms of poetry to teach students including Haiku poetry, Calligram poetry, Limericks, Kenning Poetry, Free-verse and sonnets. Improve you poetry writing skills.
Content for this page has been written by Shane Mac Donnchaidh. A former principal of an international school and university English lecturer with 15 years of teaching and administration experience. But, again, other arts or technologies seem better at those jobs—novels offer us real or imaginary worlds to explore or escape to, tweets offer us poignant epigrams, painting and design offer us eye candy, and music—well, face it, poetry has never been able to compete with that sublime combo of lyrics, instruments, and melody.
There is at least one kind of utility that a poem can embody: ambiguity. Ambiguity is not what school or society wants to instill. That said, day-to-day living—unlike sentence-to-sentence reading—is filled with ambiguity: Does she love me enough to marry?
Should I fuck him one more time before I dump him? Try crowd-sourcing for an answer. But the metaphor quickly falls apart. Such animals live on their own, utterly unconcerned with the names humans put upon them.
But here too, the metaphor breaks down. A worn-out part on an automobile can be switched out with a nearly identical part and run as it did before. In a poem, a word exchanged for another word even a close synonym can alter the entire functioning of the poem. The most productive thing about trying to define a poem through comparison—to an animal, a machine, or whatever else—is not in the comparison itself but in the arguing over it. Whether or not you view a poem as a machine or a wild animal, it can change the machine or wild animal of your mind.
A poem helps the mind play with its well-trod patterns of thought, and can even help reroute those patterns by making us see the familiar anew. An example: the sun. Consider a poem lurking in the pages of The New Yorker.
There it is staring you in the face: Do you read it as well as it reads you? In terms of ink on paper, it does nothing more than the prose around it, but in terms of apprehension, it draws in your eye and places the poem in a rarefied position and a totally ignorable one all at once.
What a waste of my time! How much did that cost? The magazine gave up valuable space to print the poem instead of printing a longer article or an advertisement. Nobody bought the copy of The New Yorker for the poem, except perhaps for the poet who wrote it.
It contains twelve stanzas, with four quatrains and a rhyme scheme of abcb. The main function of a poem is to convey an idea or emotion in beautiful language. It paints a picture of what the poet feels about a thing, person, idea, concept, or even an object.
Poets grab the attention of the audience through the use of vivid imagery , emotional shades, figurative language , and other rhetorical devices. However, the supreme function of a poem is to transform imagery and words into verse form, to touch the hearts and minds of the readers. They can easily arouse the sentiments of their readers through versification. In addition, poets evoke imaginative awareness about things by using a specific diction , sound, and rhythm.
Definition of Poem A poem is a collection of spoken or written words that expresses ideas or emotions in a powerfully vivid and imaginative style.
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