This week’s topic: Philosophise.
Poetry is often seen as a bit vague, and out there, with allegories and metaphors which sole purpose seems to be to confuse the reader. Not to mention the semi-intellectual drizzle that is often put into rhyme. This week, I’m going to ask you to do exactly that, show me something you’re thinking about, in terms of some abstract concept that may or may not provide deeper insight into whatever. Maybe you’ve got something to say about the relations between humanity and the divine, the holy grail for world peace; or the finer intricacies of the impact of ducks’ quacks on the development of dubstep music. Write something that might pass for insightfulness (or not), and put it into poetry.
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This week’s optional requirement: Write something in Heroic Couplets.
In one of the other threads in the CC, Alexander Pope was mentioned. As I'm quite lazy and uninspired at the moment, I thought it would therefore be nice to pay some attention to Heroic Couplets, which Pope quite extensively used in his work. As you might remember, some months ago, we discussed blank verse, a non-rhyming form of poetry with a metric scheme. Heroic couplets aren't much different, in that they (often) adhere to a metric scheme, usually consisting of lines of iambic pentameters (five pairs or unstressed-stressed da-DUM syllables). The difference with heroic couplets lies in the fact that they do rhyme, with an end-rhyming scheme. As the name 'couplets' already implies, poems in heroic couplets are formed through 'chunks' of two lines, that rhyme with each other.
If we for example take a look at one of Pope's more famous poems, 'An Essay on Criticism', you can see that each pair of two lines contains its own example of end-rhyme:
Some few in that, but Numbers err in this, (a)
Ten Censure wrong for one who Writes amiss; (a)
A Fool might once himself alone expose, (b)
Now One in Verse makes many more in Prose. (b)
I personally don't really like Pope, to be quite honest. The language is often quite archaic and formulaic (though it was of course written a long time ago), and his essays often consist of a few hundred pages. Like blank verse, poetry in heroic couplets does not have any set length, which is quite nice to the the degree that it allows you more freedom to write your poetry, but can be a bit long after the first fifty pages or so.
Pope's lines are all quite neat, fully-formed thoughts on a single line, that more or less read as isolated lines. Would you read them out loud, it's quite easy to take a breath after each line. However, as you may know, many (more recent) poems let go of this rigid line-division, and have their text 'spill over' into the following lines, put a period half way through a line, or otherwise try to break up the monotony of Pope's example, and that of many others.
An example of a more recent, influential poet who occasionally wrote stuff in heroic couplets is Wilfred Owen. The poem 'A Terre' breaks with many of the conventions that for example Pope follows in his poem:
We used to say we'd hate to live dead-old, — (a)
Yet now ... I'd willingly be puffy, bald, (a)
And patriotic. Buffers catch from boys (b)
At least the jokes hurled at them. I suppose (b)
Little I'd ever teach a son, but hitting, (c)
Shooting, war, hunting, all the arts of hurting. (c)
As you might have noticed, Owen's poem is quite different from Pope's, in that it sounds much less static, because the sentences don't stop at the end of each line, but 'spill over'. Furthermore, Owen's poem doesn't 'properly' rhyme, but contain (as you might (probably not) remember from week 2) slant rhyme, i.e. words that almost sound similar, but not really quite enough.
Of course Pope and Owen are only two examples of possible ways to write heroic couplets, and many more have been tried (some more like Pope, some more like Owen, some completely different) over the years. As with any form of poetry, I'd advise you to just go with something that sounds good to you. The only thing you need to remember for the purpose of this excercise is:
Heroic Couplets: Rhyming pairs of lines in (mostly) iambic pentameter, with no set length.
Have fun writing!
