Poetry for Dummies: Why It Matters and How to Read It

Poetry has likely been around in one form or another since before formal written language even existed. It's no surprise, then, that we have all been so frequently and heavily exposed to it throughout our lives - but what is poetry, really? Like any complex art form, poetry leaves us all with our own unique and very personal impressions of how to answer such a question. But for the many, many people to whom poetry has never really been anything more than a school-day annoyance at worst and a catchy bedtime story at best, trying to absorb, understand, or even pretend to care about it can quickly become too frustrating and annoying to even bother with.

With all of our modern conveniences and preoccupations, it's all too easy to forget about the meticulous oral rhythms and repetitions that used to play a vital role in keeping human cultures and social connections alive all over the world. But poetry, like all forms of language, is a living thing - it grows, it changes, it evolves - to adapt, to survive. Simply put, poetry is and always will be a crucial part of all human cultures, no matter how well we might learn to ignore it, and even though the face of poetry is strikingly different today than it was a few centuries or even a few decades ago, trying to understand it and everything it still has to tell us about who we are as human beings would be ultimately pointless without going back to basics, and trying to understand certain fundamentals about where it comes from, and why.

Prosody is essentially the basic skeleton of what makes poetry, well, poetry, and is made up of 3 core components: rhythm, meter, and tone. Each one can have a drastic effect on the meaning and feeling in a poem, and all 3 take on radically different forms in different languages. In English, rhythm is traditionally defined metrically, by the arrangement of stressed and un- stressed syllables within a line, called 'feet.' The groups of these units used to measure, define and differentiate rhythm within a poem are, as in music, referred to as 'meters,' and they're typically read and interpreted based on how the different feet within them are arranged. Stressed syllables or 'beats' tend to be "harder" - more pronounced and exaggerated, longer and louder -than unstressed ones, so they define the pulse of how most rhythms are heard and understood, like a heartbeat, pushing the meter along. The six main types of feet are named after these nifty but understandably intimidating Greek words like 'pyrrhic' and 'dactyl,' but with a little practice, they're actually fairly easy to remember:

iamb - unstressed syllable followed by a stressed
trochee - stressed syllable followed by an unstressed
dactyl - stressed syllable followed by two unstressed
anapest - two unstressed followed by one stressed
spondee - two stressed, one after the other
pyrrhic - two unstressed, one after the other

When reading these feet and the rhythms they make up, there are simple ways to mark the metrical patterns as you go along, called 'scansion' or 'scanning'. This not only helps with learning to better understand, retain, and be able to name the different patterns, but can add another visual dimension to many poems, especially more complex ones, making it easier to pick out recurring patterns and subtle twists sometimes thrown in to seem intentionally jarring or out of place to enhance or emphasize certain larger meanings in the language itself. There have been quite a few different notations for this over the years, but one that seems to be popular with the kids these days looks something like this:

- / - / - / - / - /
"Do not go gentle into that good night,"

So if you listen to the cadence of the words as you read along, obviously " / " marks the stressed beats, and " - " (or sometimes " _ ") marks the unstressed ones.

For the actual number of feet in each line, the Greeks have been nice enough to lend us another (even longer) list of terminology, but if you paid even a tiny bit of attention during geometry (or Sesame Street, if you're anything like me), this one will be easy, I promise:

dimeter = 2 feet
trimeter = 3 feet
tetrameter = 4 feet
pentameter = 5 feet
hexameter = 6 feet
heptameter = 7 feet
octameter = 8 feet

Once you've got the hang of those, it's just a matter of putting them to good use. Take this Shakespeare guy I'm always hearing so much about - apparently he's keen on using what's called 'blank verse,' or unrhymed 'iambic pentameter': ten-syllable lines with about 5 iambs each (ba BUM ba BUM ba BUM ba BUM ba BUM)-

Ex:
[Indeed this counselor]

- / - / - / - / - /
Is now most still, most secret, and most grave,
- / - / - / - / - /
Who was in life a foolish prating knave

-(Hamlet III.iv)

Try taking a few lines of a poem or two you might have handy and 'scanning' them just like this, and see if you can figure out what the rhythm scheme is. Remember, the overall rhythm of a poem is usually based on what the average or most common recurring pattern is, even if a lot of lines deviate from it. This can be good practice, at the very least, and in many cases also reveals clues to help decode underlying meanings throughout the whole poem.

But what does any of it matter? Understanding some of the fundamentals of reading and analyzing poetry is all well and good, but honestly, what's the point of it all? Obviously, being able to tell a spondee apart from an anapest probably isn't going to come in a whole lot of handy in most people's day to day lives, but that really isn't the point, either. All forms of poetry, like all forms of language and artistic expression in general, have their own particular rules, vocabularies, and quirks, many of which may seem justifiably rigid, outdated, and just plain boring at times, taken on their own. But what each and every one of them ultimately boils down to is just another way of expressing the unique feelings and meanings each of us takes from our everyday lives, a way of looking at and understanding the world around us, and trying to capture those things in whatever way speaks the most to us as individuals.

Trying too hard to either follow or break every 'rule' you can find will never be worth the effort, and arguably defeats the entire purpose. But like with every art form, the more you understand the basic language, traditions, and techniques that have made poetry what it is today, the closer you get to unlocking some of the very real and powerful insights buried underneath all of the common generalizations, clichés, and misinterpretations that unfortunately prevent most of us from really seeing new and interesting perspectives all around us every day. In other words, poetry gives back whatever you're willing to put in, and breaking it down to its most basic parts is kind of like picturing the audience naked when you're up on stage - once you can see past the superficial posturing to the bare flesh underneath, you might just find a comforting familiarity you never knew was there.