Prick up your ears

Getting to grips with poetic techniques.

The poet Robert Frost once famously said, The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader. This is about the kind of poetry he wanted to write, rooted in everyday speech, but its also a useful reminder that one of the best ways of revising poetry is to listen to it many times through recordings, or reading it aloud yourself. Reading with your ears will help you feel how the poet has created the effects, and writing about these will get you more marks. Read on to hear about two key effects: repetition and tone.

Repetition
Repetition is really common in poetry, working in all sorts of ways: to draw attention to ideas, to create rhythm, to structure the poem into parts, or to bring the poem together as a whole. Repetition can be repeats of sounds, words, phrases, lines, refrains, structures, sections or stanzas. Spotting the more obvious forms of repetition like repetition of a word or a line is easy enough, but where you score the marks in the exam is in being able to talk about why its there. We show you how, with two poems from different cultures and traditions.

Hurricane Hits England By Grace Nichols

Tropical Oya of the Weather, I am aligning myself to you, I am following the movement of your winds, I am riding the mystery of your storm. Ah, sweet mystery, Come to break the frozen lake in me. Shaking the foundations of the very trees within me, Come to let me know That the earth is the earth is the earth.

Limbo By Edward Kamau Brathwaite

e stick is th And limbo e front of m silence in limbo limbo me limbo like limbo me limbo like

Repetition creates a rhythmic effect when hearing this poem; limbo / limbo like me is like the chorus of a song. This connects with slave songs that were a form of resistance to the power of slave owners. The repetition recreates the rhythm of the limbo dance and invites us to think about how it symbolises slaves going down into the hold of the ships. In Christian thought, limbo is also a place between Heaven and Hell, and the repetition might also make us think about the ship as a place between life in Africa and death in slavery.

e night is th long dark e m front of silence in limbo me limbo like

In these lines, the speaker realises that the hurricane can connect her to her homeland and to England by making her recognise that all places are connected. With the repetition of I am and you/your, and Come to and me, these lines read like a vow or a prayer, creating a sense of desire for a powerful religious or mystical experience. The speaker wants the hurricane to be a supernatural force that will put her back in touch with the earth. The repetition of the earth is in the last line makes that force seem full of power and certainty.

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POETIC TECHNIQUES

Poetry

Tone
Tone in poetry is a more subtle feature than repetition, but its always there; it is the attitude that underlies the poems style. Tone can be a powerful force in shaping the way a reader feels, but to comment effectively on it you need to read with your ears, trying to hear the speakers voice. It could be angry or resigned, happy or sad, humorous or serious, playful or sombre, tender or aggressive, formal or informal or any other attitude the writer might have towards the subject or the reader. Here are two examples to show how its done.

Unrelated Incidents By Tom Leonard

What Were They Like by Denise Levertov

Sir, their light hearts turned to stone. It is not remembered whether in gardens stone lanterns illumined pleasant ways.

thi reason a talk wia BBC accent iz coz yi widny wahnt mi ti talk aboot thi trooth wia voice lik wanna yoo scruff

A humorous tone is created by the tension between what is being said about language, and the way it is written. The speaker is a newsreader with conservative views about correct accents but his words are in phonetic spellings which indicate a Glaswegian accent. This contrast, and the idea of a BBC newsreader using slang like yoo scruff, creates the humorous tone. When you know Tom Leonard is Glaswegian, you might nd the tone more satirical designed to attack the kinds of snobbery about region, accent and social class that are implied by BBC English.

The writer uses a formal, polite tone here. The term of address Sir is respectful. It is not remembered is a politely indirect way of referring to the loss of shared memories about the gardens. The unusual word illumined is formal, suggesting a cultured and educated speaker who is maintaining some distance from the Sir he is reporting to. This tone combines with the details of destruction to create an elegiac or mournful atmosphere. This invites the reader to feel sad about the theme of the poem the wiping out of an ancient culture by the Vietnam War.

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next week

Comparing poems on a set theme: nature.

Revision in minutes

Take any poem and read it aloud, exaggerating and experimenting with different tones of voice until it feels right.

Highlight some of the words, phrases or lines that seem to be most important in carrying this tone.

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WEEK 4