The art of poetry Flashcards
(35 cards)
Notions de versification
La forme poetique
La forrne poetique poeme se divise en strophes (stanzas} et en vers(lines) de longueur variable. Chaque vers est divise par une cesure (caesura}, pause qui separe le vers en deux hemistiches (hemistichs). Lorsque la fin du vers ne correspond pas a la fin d’une sequence grammaticale, on parle d’enjambement (run-on line ou enjambment). A l’inverse, il s’agit d’un vers qui fait coincider grammaire et metrique (end-stopped line). Une strophe de deux vers est un distique. (couplet,ou distich quand le couplet developpe une seule idee coherente ), puisqu’on parle de tercet (tercet), quatrain (quatrain), cinquain (cinquain), sizain (sestet), septain (septet) et huitain (octave). Le vers, selon le nombre de syllabes accentuees qu’il contient, porte le nom de monometer, dimeter, trimeter, tetrameter, pentameter, hexameter (plus rarement, alexandrine), heptameter et octameter. Le vers le plus courant en anglais est le pentametre iambique (iambic pentameter) : les pieces de Shakespeare I’utilisent abondamment sous la fonne du vers blanc regulier mais non rime. • Rythme et accentuation. La poesie anglophone est detenninee par un rythme (rhythm) particulier fait se croiser rythme naturel de la langue (v. Principes d’accentuation ) le texte doit etre lu a voix haute. A la difference de la poesie anglaise dont l’unite de base est la syllabe, la scansion en poesie anglaise est rythmee a la fois par le nombre de syllabes et le nombre d’accents (stresses ou beats) contenu clans chaque vers. L’unite de base de la scansion anglaise est le pied (foot), groupe de deux ou trois syllabes (parfois le pied peut n’avoir quune seule syllabe) comportant au moins une syllabe accentuee. C’est le nombre et la distribution des syllabes accentuees (/) et non accentuees (x) dans le pied qui determine le type de pied auquel on a. On considere qu’un pied qui s’acheve sur une syllabe accentuee est ascendant (x /, par exemple), alors quun pied qui s·acheve sur une syllabe non accentuee est descendant (/ x /, par exemple ). on parle de pentameter pour un vers de cinq pieds ; de iambic meter pour designer un iambe (un pied du type x. /) ou pour designer la structure d’un vers ou d’un poeme composes essentiellement de ianbes: de meter pour la versification typique de la ballade (v. infra). On distingue deux grands types de mettre en fonction du nombre de syllabes des pieds qui le fondent: le metre binaire (binary meter) correspond a un pied de deux syllabes ; le metre temaire (ternary meter) correspond a un pied de trois syllabes.
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Chaque vers peut etre compose uniquement d’un type de pied specifique, binaire ou ternaire, iambe ou trochee. La repetition d’un type de pied dans un poeme forme la regularite metrique (metrical pattern) du poeme, qu’il s’agit dans un premier temps de reperer, Cependant un poeme n’est pas sauf exception, totalement regulier ; de nombreuses variations et combinaisons sont possibles, par exemple lorsqu’un pied temaire est inclus un metre binaire… Ces effet, c’est dans 1’ ecart entre la structure d’ ensemble (par exemple un poeme en pentametres iambiques) et le detail du vers (par exemple un pied introducteur qui n’est pas un iambe mais une trochee) que glisse la matiere poetique. Chaque variation produit un effet de sens en soulignant (to foreground) une image ou un mot. En particulier, l’accentua naturelle dun mot peut entrer en conflit avec la regularite metrique.Les articles ou verbes auxiliaires ne sont pas generalaement accentues dans la phrase anglaise (v. La structure de la phrase). Lorsque la metrique les met en avant, il s’agit de foregrounding et cela merite commentaire. Par exemple, le vers d’Emily Dickinson “MY life has stood-a loaded Gun”, une fois scande, respecte 1’accentuation naturelle et le rythme de la parole* :
Si un mot doit etre accentue de maniere differente a cause du metre, on parle de wrenched accent. Par exemple, clans la ballade populaire ‘’And I fear, rny dear master’, on a affaire a un metre iambique dont 1’accent metrique tomberait sur la derniere syllabe du dernier mot, ce qui entre en conflit avec l’accentuation naturelle, master. ) .*
x / x / x / x /
My life has stood—a loaded Gun”
Le rythme le plus repandu, car le plus proche de la parole en anglais est un rythme binaire ascendant, l’iambe (iamb. adjectif : iambic, x / ;
x / x / x / x / x /
When I have fears that I may cease to be” (John Keats, sonnet)
b) Le trochee (trochee adjectif :trochaic ) est un rythme binaire descendant :
/ x / x / x /
“Tyger, tyger, burning bright’’ (William Blake ‘The ‘tyger”)
c) L’anapeste (anapest, adjectif: anapestic, xx/ ) est un rythme ternaire ascendant:
x x / x x /
Little Lamb, who made thee’!” (William Blake, “The Lamb”)
Le dactyle ( dactyl, adjectif : dactylic, / x x) est un rythme ternaire descendant peu utilise hors des pieces comiques :
/ x x / x x /
‘Hickory Dickory Dock” (Nursery Rhyme)
d) Le spondee (spondee, adjectif: spondaic, //} est un pied qui contient deux syllabes accntuees consecutives ; il n’est pas utilise de maniere continue comme moyen de souligner un mot ou une idee :
x / / / / / / x
“Its eyes closed, pink white eyelashes.” (Ted Hughes, “View of a Pig’’) Pig”)
e) Le pyrrhique (pyrrhic, adjectif identique, x x) est un pied de deux syllabes non accentuees; on considere souvent que ce pied est une substitution ou appartient au pied adjacent.
x x / / x x /
“To a green Thought in a green Shade” (Andrew Marvell, ‘’Tite Garden’)
Les sons
Il convient de porter une attention particuliere aux schemas des rimes ( rhyme schemes), qui sont utilises a des fins specifiques (ainsi dans le theatre elisabethain un distique rime, rhming couplet, signifie la fin d’une scene), et l’analyse des rimes doit etre liee a une etude de la syntaxe et de 1a grammaire du vers, en gardant a l’esprit qu’une rime peut se trouver a l’interieur du vers: on parle de rime interne (internal rhyme) lorsque le dernier mot du vers fait echo a celui se trouvant avant la cesure.
Il existe en anglais deux types de rimes selon l’accentuation, la rime masculine (masculine rhyme), qui est une monosyllabe accentuee, ou Ia rime feminine (feminine rhyme), rime de plusieurs syllabes dont la derniere nest pas accentuee. La rime la plus courante est denommee true rhyme, lorsque la sequence finale d’une voyelle et d’une consonne est identique dans les deux mots. Les autres types de rimes sont appeles imparfaits : si seule la consonne finale est repetee, il s’agit d’une rime pauvre (half-rhyme) si les consonnes initiales et finales sont repetees on parle de slant rhyme (par exemple let/lit) enfin, la rime pour l’eil ( oeil rhyme) fait rimer deux syllabes similaires d’apparence mais prononcees differemment (par exemple, rough/dough).
Les differents schemas de rimes finales sont les suivants :
a) rime plate : couplet rhymes (AABBCC)
b) rimes croisees : alternate rhyme (ABABAB)
c) rimes embrassees: enclosing rhymes (ABBA CDDC)
rime couee : tail-rhyme (AABCCB)
THE CAESURA
Nearly every line of verse of three or more feet contains a rhythmical pause known as the caesura, a name derived from Classical prosody. Some lines may have two or more pauses, but only the more emphatic one is the caesura. Although it is usual for this pause to come near the middle of the line, it may occur anywhere, between feet or within them. Indeed, variety and effectiveness are gained by a constant shifting of the caesura in succeeding lines. As a rule, the caesura coincides with a pause in the sense. If the pause follows an accented syllable, the caesura is said to be masculine; if it follows an unaccented syllable, it is said to be feminine. A caesura is commonly indicated thus 11 .Each of the two segments of a line of poetry so divided is called a hemistich. Note the caesuras in the following lines from Milton’s Paradise Lost. Feminine caesuras occur in lines 2 and 10; the others are masculine.*
High on a throne of royal state, // which far
Outshone the wealth of Ormusil and of Ind,
Or where the gorgeous East // with richest hand
Showers on her kings // barbaric pearl and gold,
Satan exalted sat, // I by merit raised
To that bad eminence; // and, from despair
Thus high uplifted beyond hope, // I aspires
Beyond thus high, // insatiate to pursue
Vain war with Heaven; // and, by success untaught,
His proud imaginationsl // thus displayed.
-Milton, Paradise Lost
THE ALEXANDRINE
The Alexandrine is a line composed of six iambic feet; it is so called because it was used in Old French poems on Alexander the Great. Although widely used in France, it has never become popular in England. It was used in the Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester (c. 1300), along with a seven-accent line; occasionally in the miracle and the morality plays; and in Drayton’s Polyolbion (c. 1613). When the Alexandrine was alternated with the seven-accent line, the combination was called poulter’s measure, because in the words of George Gascoigne (1575) the poulterer “giveth twelve for one dozen, and thirteen for another.” Henry How ard, Earl of Surrey, thus illustrates poulter’s measure:
Pope characterized the Alexandrine as “languishingly slow”-
A needless Alexandrine ends the song / That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.
-Pope, An Essay on Criticism
Used at the end of shorter-line stanzas, the Alexandrine adds the effect of dignity and serves to join the stanzas in harmonious progression. See the Spenserian stanza and Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.
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BLANK VERSE
The most stately meter in English poetry is blank verse-that is, unrhymed verse written in iambic pentameter measure. As far as we know, the Earl of Surrey (c. 1517-1547) was the first English poet to use it. He borrowed it from Italian writers ~~loyed it in a translation of two books of the Aeneid,) Many other poets followed his example; Maiil6we used it in Tamburlaine in 1589, and his “mighty line,” as it came to be called, set the fashion for Shakespeare and later dramatists. Because of its vigor and majesty, it also became the established measure for English epics and other dignified narrative verse, like Keats’s Hy perion and Tennyson’s Idylls of the King.
Surrey’s blank verse is a little stiff, adhering closely to the exact iambic movement. Moreover, it is rather consistently end-stopped (a natural pause falling at the end of a line), and hence has the quality of conventional couplets without rhyme. Marlowe’s early verse shows a similar stiffness, but his later verse has considerably more flexibility.
The development of Shakespeare’s drama to full maturity runs parallel to the increasing adaptability of his blank verse, as can be seen in the change from the essentially lyric impulse of Romeo and Juliet to the subtly dramatic movement of speech in Antony and Cleopatra.
With Milton blank verse achieves broad rhetorical variety, partly through the run-on line (the end of a line does not correspond to a natural pause in speech; see eniambment, p. 12) and the changing position of the caesura.
Wordsworth shows a certain Miltonic influence, but adapts blank verse to serve his purpose of more simple and direct communication.
Tennyson elevates it to a new eloquence suitable for the variety of themes with which he concerned himself. The essential naturalness of blank verse has been felt sufficient justification for its continued use by many modern poets. No other set meter in English lends itself so well to the characteristic expression of individual authors.*
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Sir, I will eat no meat, I’ll not drink, sit;
If idle talk will once be necessary,
I’ll not sleep neither: this mortal house I’ll ruin,
Do Caesar what he can. Know, sit, that I
Will riot wait pinion’d at your master’s court;
Nor once be chastised with the sober eye
Of dull Octavia. Shall they hoist me up
And show me to the shouting varletry
Of censuring Rome? Rather a ditch in Egypt
Be gentle grave unto me! Rather on Nilus’ mud
Lay me stark naked, and let the water-flies
Blow me into abhorring!
-Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra
Of Mari’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
Sing, Heavenly Muse.
-Milton, Paradise Lost
And bore him to a chapel nigh the field,
A broken chancel with a broken cross,
That stood on a dark strait of barren land.
On one side lay the ocean and on one
Lay a great water, and the moon was full.
-Tennyson, Morte dArthur
When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.
But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay.
Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain.
-Robert Frost, Birches
THE RHETORIC OF VERSE
RHYME Words are said to rhyme if the accented vowels have the same sound, if the sounds following those vowels are the same, and if the consonants preceding the vowels are different. Examples are deep sleep, shade-made, orn-forlorn, swallow-follow, snow-flow. Usage allows so-called imperfect rhymes, sometimes referred to as slant rhymes or pararhymes that is, words with slight variations in the accented vowels, such as earth-hearth, heaven-given, love-prove, guest-feast. A rhyme in which only single syllables correspond is called a masculine rhyme, as home–roam; one in which two syllables correspond is called a feminine rhyme, as otion-potion; one in which three syllables correspond is called a triple or multiple rhyme, as tenderly-slenderly. Rhyming words usually come at the ends of lines, but sometimes internal rhymes are used in which the last word in a line rhymes with a word
Rhyme serves a double purpose in a poem-it accentuates the rhythm, and it binds the lines into stanzas or other structural units. The rhyme scheme of a poem or a stanza is indicated by letters of the alphabet, rhyming
lines being designated with the same letter. The rhyme scheme of the stanza quoted above is abcb, with the second and fourth lines rhyming. Two other terms, homonym and homophone, should be noted in connection with rhyme. A homonym (lit., having the same name) is a word pronounced in the same way as another but having a different meaning, origin, and-in most cases-spelling: dear-deer, praise-prays-preys. The homonym may be the basis not only of rhyming but also of punning, as in Donne’s A Hymn to God the Father: “When thou hast done, thou hast not done.” A homophone (lit., having the same sound) is a letter pronounced the same as another: arc-hark, seraph-tariff.
And through the drifts the snowy clifts
Did send a dismal sheen;
Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken
The ice was all between.
–Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
ALLITERATION
The earliest English poetry secures its metrical effect by means of alliteration, sometimes called beginning rhyme-or initial-rhyme, as distinguished from end rhyme. The Anglo-Saxon line of verse is broken into two parts, each of which contains two strongly stressed syllables. The third stressed syllable in the line alliterates with the first or the second stressed syllable, or with both. Only identical consonants alliterate, but all vowels alliterate. With this prominence given to stressed syllables, there is considerable freedom about unstressed syllables, both in number and in position.
Some poets, intrigued by the rhythm of Anglo-Saxon poetry, have tried to reproduce in modern verse the effect of primitive alliteration. Tennyson’s translation of the Anglo-Saxon Battle of Brunanburh reproduces fairly well the spirit of the original, although he uses short lines instead of the long lines of the original.*
ASSONANCE
Assonance is an agreement of accented vowel sounds preceded and followed by unlike consonant sounds. it is’ a principle of verse in the Song of Roland–the old French epic, and in Spanish poetry. It is found also in early Latin poetry of the Church. In English poetry it appears only as an ornament, but it is capable of interesting if subtle effects. In the first example below, assonance appears mainly in the last words of the lines; in the second it is used throughout the stanza, along with rhyme. *
Never had huger
Slaughter of heroes
Slain by the sword-edge
Such as old writers
Have writ of in histories
Hapt in this isle, since
Up from the East hither
Saxon and Angle from
Over the broad billow
Broke into Britain with
Haughty war-workers who
Harried the Welshman, when
Earls that were lured by the
Hunger of glory gat
Hold of the land.
-Tennyson, Battle of Brunanburh
W. H. Auden has written verse making use of alliteration in the traditional long line.
”0 where are you going?” said reader to rider,
”That valley is fatal when furnaces burn,
Yonder’s the midden whose odors will madden,
That gap is the grave where the tall return.”
”0 do you imagine,” said fearer to farer,
”That dusk will delay on your path to the pass,
Your diligent looking discover the lacking
Your footsteps feel from granite to grass?”
-W. H. Auden, Epilogue
Maiden, crowned with glossy blackness,
Lithe as panther forest-roaming,
Long-armed naiad, when she dances,
On a stream of ether floating.
–George Eliot, The Spanish Gypsy
CONSONANCE
Though consonance generally means the harmony of sounds, as opposed to dissonance, the discord or incongruity of sounds, the word has a specific application to the use of language in poetry: consonance is the recurrence of certain consonants in combination with various vowels and other consonants. The underlined consonants in the lines below illustrate this effect.
ONOMATOPOEIA
Onomatopoeia is said to occur when the sound of a word echoes the sense of the word. There is indeed a small group of genuinely onomatopoetic words, such as murmur, buzz, clang, crack, boom. Coleridge, in the following passage from Cbristabel, makes obvious use of such words:*
It should be emphasized that the meaning of a word is of primary importance and its onomatopoetic effect always secondary. Furthermore, similar vowel and consonant sounds are capable of widely different effects in different contexts. A passage of Pope’s is of interest here. Notice the different effects, for example, achieved with the letters.*
And the owls have awakened the crowing cock,
Tu-whit!-Tu-whoo!
–Coleridge, Christabel
‘Tis not enough no harshness gives offense,
The sound must seem an echo to the sense:
Soft is the strain when Zephyr gently blows,
And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows;
But when the loud surges lash the sounding shore,
The hoarse, rough verse should like the torrent roar:
When Ajax strives some rock’s vast weight to throw,
The line too labors, and the words move slow;
-Pope, An Essay on Criticism
It would seem that “smoothness” and “roughness” may often be represented more by such things as the movement of the verse and rhyme scheme than by the actual sound of individual words. In the following stanza, for example, Dryden attempts to suggest in words something of the quality of music (note the onomatopoetic “double, double, double beat”). But one should note, too, the way in which the short lines and the quick recurrence of rhyme suggest shrillness.*
REPETITION
Repetition as a poetic device may involve a single word, a phrase, a line, or even an entire stanza. Used in a hymn or other song, it appears as a refrain or a chorus. Sometimes the poet varies the effect by making slight changes in the repeated phrase, line, or stanza. (a) Incremental repetition, typical of the old ballads, is the repetition of a phrase or sentence with a slight change and increment of meaning from stanza to stanza.
(b) Repetition of words at the beginning of successive clauses is called anaphora. An instance is found in Keats’s sonnet, “When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be” in which a series of three ideas forming the three quatrains are introduced as follows:*
(c) The refrain is illustrated by Spenser’s Epithalamion, each long stanza of which ends with a slight variation of*
(d) The chorus is illustrated by Dryden’s Alexander’s Feast, which repeats as a chorus the last four to ten lines of each stanza.*
are repeated as the first two lines of the second stanza, then both these stanzas are repeated in their entirety midway in the poem, and the first stanza repeated yet again at the end. In A Man’s a Man for A’ That, Burns repeats the phrase, “an’ a’ that,” (or “for a’ that”) at the end of the second, fourth, sixth, and eighth lines in each stanza, and joins the two phrases (“For a’ that, an’ a’ that”) to form the fifth line throughout. In “The Tiger” Blake repeats the first stanza as the last stanza, with only slight variation, and in “The Lamb” he has four pairs of repeated lines out of a total of twenty. Frost gets a strong effect by repeating only the last line of “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “And miles to go before I sleep.”
The trumpet’s loud clangor
Excites us to arms
With shrill notes of anger
And mortal alarms.
The double, double, double beat
Of the thundering drum
Cries: “Hark! the foes come;
Charge, charge, ‘tis too late to retreat!”
-Dryden, A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day
(line 1) When I have fears that I may cease to be (line 5) When I behold, upon the night’s starred face, (line 9) And when I see, fair creature of an hour!
So I unto my selfe alone will sing,
The woods shall to me answer and my Eccho ring.
-Spenser, Epithalamion
(e) Miscellaneous functions of repetition. The first two lines of George Peele’s Fair and Fair,
Fair and fair, and twice so fair,
As fair as any may be;
-Peele, Fair and Fair
ENJAMBMENT
The use of enjambment (or run-on lines) not only often prevents stiffness but also contributes much to the suggestiveness of poetry. In the following passage from Milton, for example, the long period (i.e., sentence) and the strategic placement of the words Sheer and Dropt at the start of lines reinforce the sense of a fall-*
and in Ausonian land
Men called him Mulciber; and how he fell
From Heaven they fabled, thrown by angry Jove
Sheer o’er the crystal battlements: from morn
To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve,
A summer’s day, and with the setting sun
Dropt from the zenith, like a falling star,
On Lemnos, the Aegaean isle.
-Milton, Paradise Lost
Similarly, in the following lines from George Herbert’s Church Monuments, the statement of dissolution is made vivid by the apparent looseness of the verse:*
Enjambment can, however, be used to achieve many different effects. in Robert Herrick’s “The Winding Sheet,” for example, the lines occur:*
At first “just” seems linked with “justice” and parallel to “equal” and “wise.” The reader is jolted when he reads on and finds that the word is used in a very different sense; the surprise drives home the poet’s point more emphatically. The device has continued to be us,-d in modern poetry, as in the following lines of Dylan Thomas.
After the funeral, mule praises, brays,
Windshake of sailshaped ears, muffle-toed tap
Tap happily of one peg in the thick
Grave’s foot….
-Dylan Thomas, After the Faneral It Memory of Anne Jones.*
flesh is but the glasse, which holds the dust
That measures all our time: which also shall
Be crumbled into dust.
-Herbert, Church Monuments
All wise, all equal, and all just
Alike i’ th’ dust.
-Herrick, “The Winding Sheet”
After the funeral, mule praises, brays,
Windshake of sailshaped ears, muffle-toed tap
Tap happily of one peg in the thick
Grave’s foot….
-Dylan Thomas, After the Faneral It Memory of Anne Jones.
STANZA PATTERNS
A stanza is a group of two or more lines of poetry combined according to some definite plan and constituting a division of a poem. The effect of a stanza depends upon the rhyme scheme, the length of the lines, and other metrical devices. Short lines may be used to suggest intensity, as long lines tend to reflect greater leisureliness. A quick succession of rhymes may suggest compactness and restraint, as unrhymed lines or separated rhymes may suggest freedom or relaxation. Technical variations can provide interest and prevent what otherwise might become monotony. Most important, stanza patterns should be appropriate to or reflect the nature of the subject. As a rule, stanzas are classified according to the number of their lines; a few, however, derive their names from special uses or origins.
THE COUPLET (two-line stanza-rhyming aa) Lines rhyming in Pairs are called couplets. (The technical name for a group of two lines is distich.)
Although a few poems divide the couplets into separate stanzas, and some others group them into four- or six line stanzas, most poems using couplets move continuously without stanza divisions. Two forms are common—one composed of iambic pentameter lines, the other of iambic or trochaic tetrameter lines. Following are examples of the tetrameter measure-octosyllabic couplets:
Following are examples of iambic pentameter couplets. The first, from Chaucer, represents an early use of the couplet, though not as a stanza. The second, from Pope, is written in what is known as the heroic couplet, so called from its use in the consciously grandiloquent drama of the later seventeenth century (Dryden and Otway). The two lines of the heroic couplet express a fairly complete thought, with the second line often reinforcing the first; because of this completeness, with the thought ending with the second line, the couplet is said to be closed or end-stopped. The third example from Keats is called the open or run-on couplet because, as in Chaucer, the thought is carried beyond the end of the two lines. The closed couplet was the favorite medium of the didactic and satiric verse of the neoclassical period of English literature, and it is well suited to those types. It is also particularly appropriate for epigrams (see p. 24); a little practice will show how easy it is to memorize heroic couplets. The open couplet was popular with the nineteenth-century Romanticists. The example from Endymion is somewhat extreme in that the rhyming words are made so unimportant that they are easily lost to the ear. The last quotation, from Karl Shapiro, represents the survival of the ecasyllabic couplet in modern poetry, still more often found as a unit of a stanza rather than as a stanza itself.*
The western waves of ebbing day
Rolled o’er the glen their level way;
Each purple peak, each flinty spire,
Was bathed in floods of living fire.
And from a boy, to youth he grew;
The man put off the stripling’s hue;
The man matured and fell away
Into the season of decay;
And ever o’er the trade he bent,
And ever lived on earth content.
-Scott, The Lady of the Lake
-Browning, The Boy and the Angel
In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;
-W. H. Auden, In Memory of W. B. Yeats
A Knight ther was, and that a worthy man,
That fro the tyme that he first bigan
To fyden out, he loved chivalrye,
Trouthe and honour, fredom and curteisye
.
-Chaucer, Prologue to The Canterbury Tales
Be silent always when you doubt your sense;
And speak, though sure, with seeming diffidence;
Some positive, persisting fops we know,
Who, if once wrong, will needs be always so;
But you, with pleasure own your errors past,
And make each day a Critic on the last.
‘Tis not enough, your counsel still be true;
Blunt truths more mischief than nice falsehoods do;
Men must be taught as if you taught them not,
And things unknown proposed as things forgot
.
-Pope, An Essay on Criticism
A thing of beauty is a joy forever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth;
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o’er-darkened ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits.
By marring the image, by the black device
Of the goat-god, by the clown of Paradise,
By fruits of cloth and by the navel’s bud,
By itching tendrils and by strings of blood,
By ugliness, by the shadow of our fear,
By ridicule, by the fig-leaf patch of hair.
-Keats, Endymion
THE TERCET (three-line stanza)
The tercet, a three-line stanza built on a single rhyme, as in the first quotation below, has obvious limitations in an extended poem.’It is more effective combined with a refrain as in the Herrick poem. But it is most successful when used with an intricate rhyme scheme known as terza rima, a scheme, borrowed from the Italian, rhyming aba, bcb, cdc, and so on; Dante’s Divine Comedy is the best example of its use. Notice that the middle line of one stanza sets the rhyme for the stanza following, a pattern of great charm in that it makes the movement of verse continuous by binding one stanza to another. Note how Shelley completes the pattern with a couplet; another plan closes with a four-line stanza rhyming alternately. The quotation from Auden is in terza rima, but employs slant rhyme.*
THE QUATRAIN (four-line stanza)
The quatrain is the most popular stanza form in English poetry. It exists in many variations, of which the following are the most familiar:
The ballad stanza (rhyming abcb) The folk ballad and many ballads written in imitation of the folk ballad use the four-line stanza with alternating tetrameters and trimeters, and with the trimeters rhyming. Other well-known types of ballad stanzas rhyme abab and aabb and employ a scheme of line lengths different from the one indicated here.*
“The sap dries up: the plant declines.
A deeper tale my heart divines.
Know I not Death? the outward signs?
“
In the hour of my distress,
When temptations me oppress,
And when I my sins confess,
-Tennyson, The Two Voices
If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share
The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, 0 uncontrollable! If even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be
The comrade of thy wanderings over heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skyey speed
Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne’er have striven
As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.
-Shelley, Ode to the West Wind
It is your face I see, and morning’s praise
Of you is ghoses approval of the choice,
Filtered through roots of the effacing grass.
Fear, taking me aside, would give advice
”
To conquer her, the visible enemy,
It is enough to turn away the eyes.”
-W. H. Auden, Family Ghosts
The bride hath paced into the hall,
Red as a rose is she;
Nodding their heads before her goes
The merry minstrelsy.
–Coleridge, The Rime Of the Ancient Mariner
The heroic quatrain, or elegiac stanza (rhyming abab) The heroic quatrain, or elegiac stanza, another popular quatrain in English poetry, is composed of iambic pentameter lines rhyming alternately. Other meters and line lengths also are common.*
One rhyming pair enclosing another (rhyming abba) Tennyson’s In Memoriam, the most famous poem using this stanza form, is notable at once for its continuous dignity and its simple melody. As shown in the second example below, this formal stanza is also used effectively by contemporary poets.*
THE SEXTAIN (six-line stanza) Various combinations of six lines may comprise this stanza.*
CHAUCERIAN STANZA, OR RHYME ROYAL (seven-line stanza-rhyming ababbec)
Because James I of Scotland wrote a Scottish poem in which he used an iambic pentameter seven-line stanza, that form is often called rhyme royal, it was Chaucer, however, who first used it in English, and for this reason the term “Chaucerian stanza” is greatly to be preferred. The rhyme scheme of the stanza makes it suitable for both lyric and narrative poetry.*
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea;
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
–Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
Only a sweet and virtuous soul,
Like a season’d timber, never gives;
But though the whole world turn to coal,
Then chiefly lives
.
-George Herbert, Virtme
Thy voice is on the rolling air;
I hear thee where the waters run;
Thou standest in the rising sun,
And in the setting thou art fair.
I praise the fall it is the human season
-Tennyson, In Memoriam
0 mistress mine, where are you roaming?
0, stay and hear; your true love’s coming,
That can sing both high and low.
Trip no further, pretty sweeting,
journeys end in lovers meeting,
Every wise man’s son doth know.
-Shakespeare, Song from Twelfth Night
The lyfe so short, the craft so long to lerne,
Thassay so hard, so sharp the conqueringe,
The dredful joye, that alwey slit so yerne,
Al this mene I by love, that my felinge
A
stonyeth with his wonderful worchinge
So sore y-wis, that whan I on him thinke,
Nat wot I wel wher that I wake or winke.
-Chaucer, The Parliament of Fowls
OTTAVA RIMA (eight-line stanza-rhyming
abababee)
This stanza, consisting of eight iambic pentameter lines, is adopted from the Italian, from which it takes its name. A peculiarly flexible stanza form, it was admirably suited, for example, to Byron’s many moods as expressed in Beppo and Don Juan,*
THE SPENSERIAN STANZA (nine-line stanza
rhyming ababbcbce)
Edmund Spenser wrote his Faerie Queene in stanzas composed of eight iambic pentameter lines followed by a hexameter line, an Alexandrine. It will be observed that the Spenserian stanza is an extension of the Chaucerian by the addition of two lines, one the Alexandrine, but both tied into the original rhyme scheme. The Alexandrine does, however, detach itself to some extent from the rest of the stanza. Often, for example, Spenser will move in the final line from narration to reflection; or he will use the line to summarize a situation.*
Although the stanza is capable of a form of “climax,” it is obvious that it is a difficult medium for narrative since the continuity is broken every nine lines. Apart from Spenser, the stanza has only seldom been used effectively. It is interesting to notice Keats’s use of it in the Eve of St. Agnes and Shelley’s in Adonais*
MISCELLANEOUS STANZA FORMS
The variety of stanza forms is almost infinite, employing any number of lines from two to eighteen (Spenser’s Epithalamion) or more. At the base of many of these will be found some form of quatrain with other lines integrated at the poet’s will.*
The coast-I think it was the coast that I
Was just describing-Yes, it was the coast
Lay at this period quiet as the sky,
The sands untumbled, the blue waves untost,
And all was stillness, save the sea-bird’s cry,
And dolphin’s leap, and little billow crost
By some low rock or shelve, that made it fret
Against the boundary it scarcely wet.
-Byron, Don Juan
Much daunted with that dint, her sence was dazd,
Yet kindling rage, her selfe she gathered round,
And all attonce her beastly body raizd
With doubled forces high above the ground:
Tho wrapping up her wrethed sterne arownd,
Lept fierce upon his shield, and her huge traine
All suddenly about his body wound,
That hand or foot to stirre he strove in vaine:
God helpe the man so wrapt in
Errours endlesse traine.
-Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Bk. 1, 1, 18
And moving through a mirror clear
That hangs before her all the year,
Shadows of the world appear.
There she sees the highway near
Winding down to Camelot;
There the river eddy whirls,
And there the surly village-churls,
And the red cloaks of market girls,
Pass onward from Shalott.
-Tennyson, The Lady of Shalott
If yet I have not all thy love,
Dear, I shall never have it all,
I cannot breathe one other sigh, to move;
Nor can entreat one other tear to fall,
And all my treasure, which should purchase thee,
Sighs, tears, and oaths, and letters I have spent.
Yet no more can be due to me,
Than at the bargain made was meant,
If then thy gift of love were partial,
That some to me, some should to others fall,
Dear, I shall never have thee all.
-Donne, Love’s Infiniteness
THE UNRHYMED STANZA
Although most poetry is written either in rhyming stanzas or in blank verse (see p. 5), a few poems are composed of unrhymed stanzas. Notable in this group is Collins’s Ode to Evening, from which the following stanzas are quoted.*
Unrhymed stanzas are prevalent in contemporary poetry.*
Now air is hushed, save where the weak-eyed bat
With short, shrill shriek, flits by on leathern wing;
Or where the beetle winds
His small but sullen horn,
As oft he rises ‘midst the twilight path,
Against the pilgrim borne in heedless hum:
Now teach me, maid composed,
To breathe some softened strain,
Whose numbers, stealing through thy darkening vale,
May, not unseemly, with its stillness suit,
As, musing slow, I hail
Thy genial loved return!
-Williarn Collins, Ode to Evening
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
-Wallace Stevens, The Snow Man
The Italian or Petrarchan sonnet
The Italian, or Petrarchan sonnet, named after the Italian poet Petrarch (1304-1374), consists of two parts -an,octave (eight lines) and a sestet (six lines). The octave is really two quatrains, rhyming abba abba; in these eight lines the poet formally presents his thought or emotion. The sestet, rhyming cde cde or cd cd cd, contains an answer, a reflection, a counteremotion, or some other resolution by way of concluding the poem. In the following example, note the importance of the word Then at the beginning of the sestet, which indicates that what follows ig directly dependent on what has previously been stated in the octave.*
The English or Shakespearean sonnet
The English or Shakespearean sonnet is associated with the poet’s name because he was the first to develop the full potentiality of this form. Its particular structure was actually devised by the Earl of Surrey after he and Sir Thomas Wyatt adopted the sonnet form into English literature from the Italian poets. The English sonnet consists of three quatrains, which present three points or aspects of an idea, and a concluding couplet which summarizes or ties together what has been expressed in the quatrains. The rhyme scheme, subject to some variation, is abab cded efef gg. The perfect fusion of form and content which the English sonnet allows is shown in the following example, where the phrase in me in the first line of each quatrain emphasizes the series of closely related thoughts being expressed, and where the pronoun This at the beginning of the couplet points back clearly to what has preceded.*
Much have I traveled in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I beard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific-and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
-Keats, On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
-Shakespeare, Sonnet 73
The Spenserian sonnet
Spenser rearranged the rhymes of the Petrarchan sonnet and sought to gain continuity through an interlocking pattern similar to that of his famous Spenserian stanza. Indeed the rhyme scheme of the first eight lines of this stanza is employed in twelve lines of the Spenserian sonnet-rhyming abab bcbc cdcd. The concluding lines of the sonnet are a couplet ee. Usually, the effect is close to that of an English sonnet, but the division into quatrains is more arbitrary, less functional.*
Fresh spring the herald of loves mighty king,
in whose cote armour richly are displayed
all sorts of flowers the which on earth do spring
in goodly colours gloriously arrayd.
Goe to my love, where she is carelesse layd,
yet in her winters bowre not well awake:
tell her the joyous time will not be staid
unlesse she doe him by the forelock take.
Bid her therefore her selfe soone ready make,
to wayt on love amongst his lovely crew:
where every one that misseth then her make,
shall be by him amearst with penance dew.
Make hast therefore sweet love, whilest it is prime,
for none can call againe the passed time.
-Spenser, Amoretti, 70
FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE (TROPES)
Meter and figurative language-that is, language that expresses one thing in terms of another by analogy, extension, or other association–are two major and virtually indispensable ingredients of poetry. A critical approach to poetry requires knowledge not only of meter but also of the function and scope of the various figures of speech. These should never be mere decoration; they are one of the means by which a poet can develop and express his meaning. Satisfactory definition of figures of speech is difficult since in ommon usage the various terms have often been made interchangeable. There is a tendency to include symbols, similes, and metaphors under the heading of “imagery”; “metaphorical” is loosely used to mean “figurative”; and “symbolical” or “symbolizes” is often applied to almost any of the figurative qualities of language. But each of these terms has a specific meaning, however arbitrary, and it is important to learn these meanings in order to have a terminology for analyzing the subtleties and complexities of poetry. The trope, which is the generic name for figures of speech (tropology is the use of figurative language), exists in a number of forms, of which four are most important: the image, the symbol, the simile, and the metaphor.
An image is the representation of a sensory experience or of an object which can be perceived through one of the five senses. In Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale we find “a drowsy numbness pains/ My sense” (feeling), “a beaker full of . . . the blushful Hippocrene” (taste and sight), “verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways” (sight), “soft incense hangs upon the boughs” (smell), and “The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves” (sound). Such lines evocative of sensation as*
became the ideal early in the twentieth century of a group of poets called the Imagists. The Imagists believed that “poetry should render particulars exactly, and not deal in vague generalities” and that poetry should “employ always the exact word, not the merely decorative word.” Their inspiration was partly drawn from a short Japanese poetical form called the Haiku, consisting usually of a single sharp image. The image is literal and concrete in its implications, no matter what thoughts or feelings it may arouse; the symbol, on the other hand, is literal, and at the same time abstract in its implications. The symbol always communicates a second meaning along with its literal meaning. For example, one can read Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale and enjoy the poem for its almost indescribably rich and beautiful imagery. The nightingale itself, on the most literal level, is a bird whose song inspires the poet and to whom the poet addresses himself. Interpreted on a deeper level, the nightingale symbolizes immortality. A symbol stands for something -in this case immortality-not specifically named or discussed within the poem. A symbol, then, is a highly dramatic and economical way for a poet to express his meaning. There are two kinds of symbols those whose abstract meanings emerge only out of the context and thus have to be created within the terms of a given poem, and those whose abstract meanings are more or less fixed by tradition and use. Examples of the first kind are the nightingale in the Keats poem just mentioned, Blake’s Tiger (evil, or experience), and George Herbert’s Collar (spiritual restraint). An example of the second kind of symbol, that with a traditional meaning, is given in the following lines*
in which the “Crosse” symbolizes the redeeming power of Christianity
Dark eyed,
0 woman of my dreams,
Ivory sandaled.
-Ezra Pound, Dance Figure
Curse on that Crosse (quoth then the Sarazin)
That keepes thy body from the bitter fit;
-Spenser, The Faerie Queene
or in this quotation*
in which, as is established by custom, “roses” symbolize life and beauty and “yew” symbolizes grief and mourning. Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” in which the two roads symbolize the element of decision in human destiny, is an example of a modern poem using a traditional symbol. A group of late nineteenth-century French poets, called the Symbolists, worked to symbolize general truths, metaphysical insights, and ysteries, and had a strong influence on a number of English and American poets who followed them. We can see from the example of Ode to a Nightingale that details expressed as images contribute to the development of a symbol. Indeed, it is customary to find various kinds of figures of speech working together in this way. The simile and the metaphor should be considered together, for they both express analogy, that is a comparison between one thing and another. The difference between them is simple: a simile establishes a comparison by the use of the word “like” or.”as”; a metaphor establishes an identity between the things being compared. A simile may be brief, as, for example, in*
or it may be extended through a whole poem, as in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 97 (“How like a winter hath my absence been/ From thee,” etc.) or Vaughan’s The World (“I saw Eternity the other night,/ Like a great ring of pure and endless light,” etc.). A metaphor also may be brief, as in these lines*
or it may be extended through a whole poem, as it is in Campion’s lyric (“There is a garden in her face,/ Where roses and white lilies grow,” etc.). A metaphor should not be confused with an image. It can be distinguished from a symbol in that the two terms involved in a metaphor are both mentioned literally, or unmistakably suggested. If any of these four terms can justifiably be used more inclusively, it is symbol, into which images, similes, and metaphors sometimes extend. Ten other relevant terms should be mentioned briefly:
Personification is the representation of an inanimate object or abstract idea as having the attributes of a living person.*
Allegory is the presentation of a continuous action or extended idea by means of symbols or personifications; a narrative in which the underlying meaning is different from the surface meaning. Spenser’s Faerie Queene is the best-known allegory in English poetry. An eponym is a name so commonly associated with the attributes of its owner that it comes to symbolize those attributes; for example, Helen (beauty), Hercules (strength), Croesus (wealth). An epithet is a word or phrase added -to or substituted for the name of a deity or person. Examples include Loving Father (God), daughters of Eve (women), the Galilean (Christ).
Metonymy is the use of one word for another with which it is for one reason or another closely connected –symbolically, causally, physically, or otherwise; for example, in the first line below, scepter, learning, and physic here stand for king, scholar, and doctor.*
Synecdoche is the use of the name of a part to signifythe whole; or of the name of the material to signify what is made from it.*
Oxymoron is the effective combination of contradictory or incongruous words, as in the following quotation.
Litotes (understatement) is a means of expressing, for example, the affirmative by using the negative of the contrary.*
Hyperbole is the use of exaggeration or overstate ment to heighten the effect.*
A paradox is a statement that is apparently contradictory. On scrutiny, however, the apparent contradiction disappears, and the statement is found to be true and richly meaningful.*
Strew on her roses, roses,
And never a spray of yew!
-Arnold, Requiescat
The chair she sat in, like a burnished throne.
-T . S. Eliot, The Waste Land
I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
-Hopkins, I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark, Not Day
Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me.
-Ernily Dickinson, The Chariot
The scepter, learning, physic, must
All follow this, and come to dust.
-Shakespeare, Fear No More the Heat o’ the Sun
often beneath the wave [the sea], wide from this ledge.
-Hart Crane, At Melville’s Tomb
In their amazement lyke
Narcissus vaine,
Whose eyes him starv’d: so plenty makes me poore.
-Spenser, Amoretti, 35
And nobody calls you a dunce,
and people suppose me clever.
-Browning, Youth and Art
I lov’d Ophelia; forty thousand brothers
Could not with all their quantity of love
Make up my sum.
-Shakespeare, Hamlet
That I may rise, and stand, o’er throw mee, and bend
Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.
-Donne, Holy Sonnets, 14
VOCABULAIRE ET FIGURES DE STYLE
L’ utilisation des mots
Les effets de son
Le travail des sons est primordial dans le travail d’ ecriture, il participe de la creation d’effets de sens : Ia repetition de plosives et de fricatives participe ainsi td’une durete sonore qui cree des effets musicaux et structure le texte et sa comprebension. Ces echos peuvent alors renforcer le lien entre signifiant et signifie ; par exemple l’onomatopee (onomatopoeia ) renvoie au pouvoir mimetique de la langue et sa capacite a imiter d’autres sons non linguistiques. Par exemple, dans la strophe qui ouvre le poeme “Christabel” de Samuel Coleridge ( v. La poesie romantique )*
Le poete joue a la fois sur des onomnopees et des repetitions de consonnes, qui font echo a la poesie alliterative anglo-saxonne. L’alliteration est la repetition de consonnes ou d’un groupe de consonnes, mais il existe aussi un autre motif de repetition de consonnes, plus rare, la consonance, qui consiste en la repetition de la consonne finale de plusieurs mots, qui a pour effet la creation d’un rythme fort (la consonance peut avoir pour effet et d’attirer l’attention sur une syllabe non accentuee et donc de modifier l’accentuation globale du groupe de mots). Iorsqu’il s’agit de la repetition de voyelles, l’assonance (aussi appelee rime vocalique, vocalic rhyme), est utiliee.
Lorsque la repetition des sons a pour effet une harmonie, un apaisement, il s’agit dune euphonie..(euphony); celle-ci est le plus souvent provoquee par la repetition de voyelles longues ou de consonnes liquides, A l’inverse la repetition de sons discordants est une cacophonie (cacophony).
Tu-whit! Tu-whoo!
And hark, again! the crowing cock
Les mots
Ainsi le choix de transformer les mots peut faire partie d’une demarche creatrice.
I’apherese ( aphaeresis ) courante en poesie, consiste a omettre la sYllabe initiale d’un mot (souvent une voyelle), sur le modele de “neath’’ -pour “beneath’. En poesie un tel precede permet d’ajuster le vers a la metrique, tout comme la syncope qui est l’omission d’une syllabe en milieu de mot, ou l’apocope .. qui consiste en une elision de la syllabe dun mot. A l’inverse, l’auteur peut ajouter des syllabes aux mots ; en debut de mot, il s’agit dune prothese (prothesis), en milieu de mot, de l’epenthese (epenthesis ) et en fin de mot, d’une paragoge. Ainsi Shakespeare, dans le second vers du sonnet 29, souligne sa detresse accentuant le verbe ‘‘weef grace a une prothese : “I all alone beweep my outcast state”.
De meme de nouveaux mots peuvent etre crees grace a la manipulation de lettres, comme les abreviations ,les acronymes, et les anagrammes (anagrams) qui sont des mots crees par le rearrangement des Iettres dun mot afin d’en creer un nouveau. Les palindromes, qui introduisent une flexibilite Iinguistique et un element ludique dans le texte, sont quant a eux des mots ou des phrases qui peuvent etre lus de la meme maniere de gauche a droite qu’a linverse, comme level’ ou “civic” . La creation de mots peut egalement correspondre au besoin de creation d’un nouveau signifie, ce qui est effectue au moyen de neologismes ( des mots entierement nouveaux). de mots-valise ( portmanteau words) qui fusionnent deax mots pour en creer un nouveau, ou de precedes linguistiques plus courants comme la creation de mots composes (compound words). Si un mot n’existe pas ou appartient a une langue etrangere sans que cet emploi soit justifie, il sagit d’un barbarisme (barbarism) et si le mot, correct, est mal utilise car il est utilise a Ia place d’un mot similaire, on parle de malapropism, d’apres le personnage de Mrs Malaprop dans la piece de theatre The Rivals (1775) de Sheridan. Ce procede demeure tres repandu dans les comedies.
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jeux de syntaxe
Outre les modifications du langage a l’echelle des sons et des mots, l’auteur peut egalement choisir de jouer avec la langue, d’opter pour une approche ludique de la communication textuelle, au moyen de jeux de mots (puns ou paronomasia) qui rapprochent des mots aux sonorites proches mais dont le sens est different ou d’un jeu sur les significations dun mot polysemiqse, La replique de Mercutio clans Romeo and Juliet de Shakespeare (v. Le theatre shakespearien), alors quil agonise, en est un exemple frappant : ‘‘Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man” (III, i), les jeux de mots peuvent egalement deriver d’une ambiguite syntaxique ou grammaticale. Le sous-entendu grivois (double_entendre est quant a lui particulierement utilise dans la litterature elisabethaine, par exemple dans les interludes comiques de pieces de Shakespeare. Ils ne sont pas necessairement mis au service d’un effet comique, et peuvent au contraire etre utilises afin de proposer plusieurs hypotheses de pensee, devenant de veritables outils de reflexion et non des ornements : on retrouve en particulier cette tendance chez Emily Dickinson (v. L’Amerique en vers) James Joyce (v. Le roman moderniste).
La parataxe, qui peut avoir un effet humoristique souvent lie a une progression par syllogismes, est egalement presente en poesie, de certains passages epiques a des textes en vers courts visant a creer des images denses. A l’inverse, l’hypotaxe est presente lorsque la subordination est abondante ; dans ce cas c’est l’ordre logique et chronologique qui est souligne. L’asyndete qui implique l’omission de conjonctions, d’articles ou de pronoms, peut faire partie dun style paratactique et la polysyndete ( polysyndeton), son inverse.
La repetition de certains mots dans la phrase ou le vers vient egalement rythmer le texte : l’anaphore (anaphora) est une repetition en debut de phrase ou de vers, alors que l’epiphore (epiphora ou epistrophe) est a l’inverse une repetition en fin de vers ou de phrase ; la combinaison d’une et d’une epiphore est une symploque (symploce). Si un meme mot est repete en fin de proposition et au debut de la suivante, il s’agit d’une anadiplose (anadiplolosis ), alors que l’encadrement d’une proposition ou d’un vers par un meme mot est une epanalepse (epanalepsis). Si le mot repete est sans aucune separation, et de maniere emphatique, on parle d’epizeuxe (epizeuxis) ; la repetition dune meme question (ou I’enchainement dune serie de questions) est designee par le terme (quaesitio ) , et celle de mots ayant la meme racine, polyptote (polyptoton).
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