The Second Coming (from the Poetry Foundation)
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Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?THEMES: Good vs. Evil, Warfare, Visions/Reality
Prose Poetry
What is a prose poem? How is it different, or is it different, than Flash Fiction?
Is it the used of metaphor, the conciseness of the writing, the attention to language?
Go here for more.
For a good example of a prose poem by Charles Simic go here
Robert Johnson and the Blues
Robert Johnson - according to legend - sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads. AP students are sometimes tempted to do this in order to pass the poetry section, but don't go to extremes (yet!).
GO HERE
1) Haiku - Japanese form traditional: 5,7,5 syllables and unrhymed. A classical haiku must state or imply a season and restrict itself to natural imagery. It is written in simple imagery in the present tense (it is happening now) but it seeks to capture a moment that symbolizes eternity.
2) Syllabic - simply refers to lines with the same number of syllables.
3) Ballad - a narrative verse lyric in any form though it frequently uses a refrain.
4) Quatrains - a four line stanza. It can contain any number of different rhyme schemes.
Ballads, Aubades, Elegies
John Mellencamp's "Jack and Diane" and Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A." also contain features of a traditional ballad.
Aubade: a lyrical/love poem delivered at dawn generally involving lovers who must part. Examples include the following:
The Sun Rising
by John Donne
Busy old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows and through curtains call on us ?
Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run ?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late school-boys, and sour ’prentices,
Go tell court-huntsmen that the King will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices ;
Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.
Thy beams, so reverend and strong
Why shouldst thou think?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long :
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Look, and tomorrow late tell me,
Whether both the Indias of spice and mine
Be where thou left’st them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saw’st yesterday
And thou shalt hear, ‘All here in one bed lay.’
She’s all States, and all Princes I ;
Nothing else is.
Princes do play us ; compared to this,
All honour’s mimic ; all wealth alchemy.
Thou, Sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world’s contracted thus ;
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that’s done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere ;
This bed thy centre is, these walls thy sphere.
Elegy: Typically a poem that laments the loss of something or someone.
Example: Dylan Thomas, "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London"
Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness
And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn
The majesty and burning of the child's death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.
Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.
If you're having trouble with these definitions you can go to THE GLOSSARY OF POETIC TERMS for help.
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