Module 2: Poetry from the archipelago

Poetry is probably the most sophisticated of all literary genres. Your

Filipino ancestors, through oral tradition, shared epics, proverbs, riddles,
and folksongs, in poetic form with specific formal scheme in which they
strictly, followed. Yet poetry is still the chosen genre of many local writers,
for its offers a uniqueness that other genres may not achieve: the
opportunity to see world anew, with every single written word.
Poetry in the Philippines is not different from its other counter parts around
the world. In the early 1990s, Filipino poetry celebrated romanticism, and
several poems about love flourished.

Types of poetry
Haikus are one category of poems. The haiku originated from Japan, Its
the shortest type of poem and, often, the most difficult to understand. It
consists of three lines that generally do not rhyme. The lines should have
five, seven, and five syllables in them.
Is an unrhymed poem consisting of three lines and seventeen
syllables. A haiku : often describes something in nature

Example:
The autumn wind blows,
Calling the leaves on the ground
To join him in dance.

Free verse poems are another type of poetry. A free verse is the loosest
type of poem. It can consist of as many lines as the writer wants. It can
either rhyme or not, and it does not require any fixed metrical pattern. Free
verse is commonly used among writers because it allows for maximum
flexibility.
This excerpt from Little Father by Li-Young Lee
I buried my father in my heart.
Now he grows in me, my strange son,
 My little root who wont drink milk,
Little pale foot sunk in unheard-of night,
Little clock spring newly wet
In the fire, little grape, parent to the future
Wine, a son the fruit of his own son,
Little father I ransom with my life.

Sonnets are another classification of poetry. A sonnet is best described as

a lyric poem that consists of fourteen lines. Sonnets have at least one or
two conventional rhyme schemes. Shakespeare in particular was famous
for writing sonnets.

Sonnet 116
By Shakespeare

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments.
Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not
Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
 Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
Name poems are popular among children and are often used in schools.
The name of the person becomes the poem. Each letter in the name is the
first letter in the line of the poem.
While a name verse poem can be as simple as using an adjective to
describe a person that begins with each letter of that person's name, these
poems can also be far more beautiful works of art. For example, here is a
name poem for a person named Alexis:

Alexis seems quite shy and somewhat frail,

Leaning, like a tree averse to light,
Evasively away from her delight.
X-rays, though, reveal a sylvan sprite,
Intense as a bright bird behind her veil,
Singing to the moon throughout the night.

Elements of Poetry
Senses and images
Are used by the writer to describe their impressions of their topic or
object of writing. The writer uses carefully chosen and phrased words to
create an imaginary that the reader can see through his or her senses. This
kinds of senses impressions in poetry are categorized in mainly the
following: visual imagery(what the writer wants you to see);olfactory
imagery(what the writer wants you to smell);gustatory imagery(what the
writer wants you to taste)tactile imaginary(what the writer wants you to
feel.);and auditory imagery(what the writer wants you to see).

Diction
Is another important element in Filipino poetry. In fact, Filipino writers
are very careful of the way they write and the words they use to form their
forms. Diction is the denotative and connotative meaning of the words in a
sentence, phrase, paragraph, or poem.
Rhyme Scheme
Is the way the author arranges words, meters, lines, and stanzas to
create a coherent sound when the poem is read out loud. It may be formal
informal, depending on the way the poem was written by the poet.
Alliteration
Is a repetition of the same consonant sounds in a sequence of
words, usually at the
Beginning of a word or stressed syllable: descending dew drops; luscious
lemons.
Alliteration is based on the sounds of letters, rather than the spelling of
words; for example,
Keen and car alliterate, but car and cite do not.
Assonance
 Is the repetition of similar internal vowel sounds in a sentence or a
line of poetry, as
In I rose and told him of my woe.
Figurative language
Is a form of language use in which the writers and speakers mean
Something other than the literal meaning of their words. Two figures of
speech that are
Particularly important for poetry are simile and metaphor.
A simile involves a comparison between unlike things using like or as. For
instance, My love is like a red, red rose. A metaphor Is a comparison
between essentially unlike things without a word such as like or as.
For example, My love is a red, red rose. Synecdoche is a type of
metaphor in which part of
something is used to signify the whole, as when a gossip is called a
wagging tongue.
Metonymy is a type of metaphor in which something closely associated
with a subject is
substituted for it, such as saying the silver screen to mean motion
pictures.
Rhyme
Is the repetition of identical or similar concluding syllables in different
words, most
often at the ends of lines. Rhyme is predominantly a function of sound
rather than spelling; thus,
words that end with the same vowel sounds rhyme, for instance, day, prey,
bouquet, weigh, and
words with the same consonant ending rhyme, for instance vain, rein, lane.
The rhyme scheme
of a poem, describes the pattern of end rhymes. Rhyme schemes are
mapped out by noting
patterns of rhyme with small letters: the first rhyme sound is designated a,
the second becomes
b, the third c, and so on.
Rhythm
Is the term used to refer to the recurrence of stressed and
unstressed sounds in poetry.
Poets rely heavily on rhythm to express meaning and convey feeling.
Caesura is a strong pause
within a line of poetry that contributes to the rhythm of the line. When a line
has a pause at its
end, it is called an end-stopped line. Such pauses reflect normal speech
patterns and are often
marked by punctuation. A line that ends without a pause and continues into
the next line for its
meaning is called a run-on line or enjambment.
Stanza
Is a grouping of lines, set off by a space, which usually has a set
pattern of meter and
rhyme.
Tone
conveys the speakers implied attitude toward the poems subject.
Tone is an abstraction
we make from the details of a poems language: the use of meter and
rhyme (or lack of them);
the inclusion of certain kinds of details and exclusion of other kinds;
particular choices of words
and sentence pattern, or imagery and figurative language (diction). Another
important element
of tone is the order of words in sentences, phrases, or clauses (syntax).