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In replies below, post your 10-line poem, the meter you were attempting, and a short reflection about writing the piece. See the directions here.
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I want to connect, but I want to betray.
Before you end up taking my heart away.
To stab it, to run a dagger through it.
To toss me away, seeing me unfit.
What we have as of now is too perfect
I count my days until the time it’s wrecked
But rather than by you, let it be by me
I cannot bear you wanting to be free
From the connection that bonds you and me
I have been happy with you for too long
I should expect that it will all go wrong
And to lose you, you who makes me feel whole
I want to connect, but I want to betrayBefore my heart is left an empty hole.
I attempted an iambic pentameter in heroic couplets. Writing and rearranging the poem to fit the needs of the meter revealed to me just how carefully crafted and well done Shakespeare’s works are. From his plays to general poetry, he always manages to write lines that convey many metaphoric meanings and convey numerous ideas even in rigid and limited structures. I have been in a mindset that Shakespeare’s works are possibly overrated and that he did not write the most interesting or insightful contents, but between understanding the lines of his work in A Midnight Summer’s Dream more, and now realizing the restrictions he puts himself to work at, I can say I’ve come to appreciate and respect his works more. This was challenging, as I felt I could’ve written a much better, more fluid and expressive poem if I could just have more words in my lines. Some of the themes of a love too good to be true get lost simply because I could not use the words that I wanted to.
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At a glance, I see 11 syllables in the first lines. It looks like each appears next to an unstressed syllable, which is sometimes okay (since stressed syllables are most important), but it’s not standard so I’m not sure if you meant it or if it’s accidental.
My instinct is to read the first lines like this:
I want to connect, but I want to betray.
Before you end up taking my heart away.I played around with other variations but I really struggle with the word “connect.” It’s iambic, but it doesn’t seem to lend itself to being followed by a stressed syllable. I tried “connection, too.” So maybe try a different word. This is what I’ve come up with one the fly. It’s pretty awkward, but might work:
I want to grow togeth’r; but crave betray’l,
before you take away my beating heart.I wish you could write a bit more about the struggles you had. You write that you respect Shakespeare more, which sure, I guess is good, but doesn’t give me a good idea of what experience you had writing. How did you try to keep yourself on rhythm? Which words did you look up (any surprises?). What troublesome lines made you think in new ways about what your meaning was?
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On this hot summer day I feel the beams of ray
The beaming rays feels like tiny spikes striking into my flesh.
As sweat trickles down my skin I feel my body getting thin
I can feel the heat of the scorching sand beneath my bare feet.
As I walk to the beginning of the sea I see no end to this sea
I dip my feet into the frigid water I feel a shiver throughout my body,
After a couple of seconds the shivering sensation fades into calmness
Deeper into the sea I feel the seaweed scrubbing against my feet
Within a matter of a couple seconds loud conversations from the shore dissolve.
As dusk approaches I chase the last rays of the sun
Knowing it is unattainable but doing it out of inner tranquility.
After attempting to write my own blank verse poem I gained even more respect for Shakespeare and his writings. This is because while writing my poem I realized the thought and process he had to go through just to write a stanza. Realizing how articulate of a person Shakespeare is because every stanza he writes has an explanation behind it even if it doesn’t make sense to us as readers at first. As you can probably tell from my attempt in writing a blank verse poem I struggled. I was not sure the topic I wanted to write about and whether or not I had enough to write about. What surprised me the most after attempting to write my poem is the time and thoughts you have to go through just to write ten stanzas. After writing this poem I hope to take the remarks of this poem and improve on my weaknesses for the upcoming poem assignments throughout this course.
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I find it intriguing that this experience reinforced Shakespeare’s language ability–for me it emphasizes how much he must have worked! Maybe I see this often because I’m a writing teacher, but people often think a “good writer” is someone who produces perfect prose sentences. Here we have evidence that to write must have been a long process! There must have been so many drafts and revisions! There are so many versions of the play that are probably hanging around–half lines that Shakespeare thought were good but didn’t quite fit the rhyme scheme. It’s an interesting thing to think about!
I notice you didn’t emphasize the stressed words. I asked for it because it can help visualize the stress patterns and reminds you to say it a certain way. For example, I read you first line like this:
“Today I remember that I must not
Be frightened of the world, as it spins so”
You begin each line with an iambic foot, both “Today” and “Be frightened” work. After that initial push, though, you start to fall off the rhythm. Usually this is because when you’re thinking in your head you’re pushing yourself into the rhythm. It helps to have someone there to read it to (or to read it back for you). Then you can start to work out what’s natural.
I really like the image and think the enjambment is a nice touch here. To fix the rhythm one possibility would be:
Today remember I must fight my fright,
of spinning always toward a hopeless end
It actually collapses the meaning of your second and third line, so it’s probably not the best solution. But it’s a way you might be able to spin it.
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Iambic Pentameter
Went to the hectic city for business.
Listened to speakers and was a witness.
After hearing, we had time to discuss.
Speaking with them gave my head such a rush,
“I am speaking to one who knows so much!”
At the end, I found ways to keep in touch.
And we spoke about a morning for brunch.
Next morning, I changed and left in a punch.
It was a great meal where I learned a bunch.
Maybe next time we will schedule for lunch. J
Reflection
Doing this assignment was honestly very fun. This was surprising to me because I thought I was going to have a hard time getting my thoughts onto the paper, in the right format. However, there is also the possibility that I could have done something wrong. There were times when I was stuck trying find a word that rhymed with the term from the line above, but then Google became my source. There were also times when I had an excess number of syllables, or not enough. I tried the method of using adjectives but it didn’t work for me too well. Instead, I thought of synonyms that had more or less syllables than the word I had in my mind so that it could fit into my sentence. Doing this assignment did not really change my view of Shakespeare. He might have had to think a lot more when writing, but then again, this type of writing was something he was more used to, so I don’t think it was too hard for him.
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here
In a line towards the bottom you have to unstressed syllables together:
Next morning, I changed and left in a punch.
The end of “morning” and “I” can’t both have the same stress and stay in iambic meter.
One way to fix it:
At dawn was I out there fast as a punch,
It skips the changing, is maybe creative in its grammar, but keeps the rhyme. And I think it matches the sound of the line that comes after.
I’m glad you liked the assignment. I’m always intrigued by what folks come up with. It certainly gives you a different understanding of Shakespeare’s vocabulary. If you found yourself looking to synonyms, it meant you weren’t always using the most direct noun. The same can be said for Shakespeare. Of course, Shakespeare sometimes makes that part of the game. Talking around something becomes part of the poetic language.
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Creative Block
I pick a peaceful place to sit and muse
A sharpened pencil ready to make art
Unsure of what I can create. To start,
The ticking clock disturbs the silent place.
The concepts come and go, like raindrops do
Inviting is the paper, but it taunts,
It knows I’m scared to stain it with the lead
Creating countless marks all over it.
I look around to get inspired and think,
My mind is blank. What can I do? I know!I ended up writing an iambic pentameter in blank verse. Before deciding what type of meter I wanted to choose, I first allowed myself to write something down. Most of the messages in the poem describes my experience with forming the actual poem. I had several ideas in my head, though I was unsure of what I wanted to delineate in the end. I decided to start off by writing about that creative block in my head. I allowed myself to write normally without thinking too much about syllables or any other restrictions, though I did make sure I had 10 lines. Afterward, I counted the syllables in each line to see how many syllables each line had. I did this to see what the general common number had been. This would help me decide what meter to choose. I ended up choosing blank verse and thought about how I could either increase the syllable count or decrease it (usually I had to decrease it). After the second attempt, I looked at the newly written lines and spoke them out loud and tapped the rhythm of iambic pentameter. I needed to rely on my musical knowledge to better hear the rhythm in the words. I kept looking at the words and thinking about how they were normally pronounced in speech. That was my difficulty overall, though I admit that I still had my moments where I felt unsure of how meters are formed. This experience made me reevaluate the way I pronounced certain words.
I rewrote the poem three times (excluding the several times I would smudge the page in my notebook from erasing words and rewriting them or changing it altogether). I wanted to try rhyming but then I realized that it would take more work to look for words that rhymed and just reconfiguring the writing altogether. Shakespeare has my respects for being able to follow all of these regulations (for the most part, but hey, no one’s perfect) while still providing meaning to his lines. This experience makes me think that he probably would have finished an entire scene in the amount of time I took writing and fixing just 10 lines. I also wonder how he would have approached his poems—did he first write freely? Or did he have a general gist of what he wanted to write and began writing down without having to consciously think about the regulations?
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Today I remember that I must not
Be frightened of the world, as it spins so
Imminently towards a hopeless, fraught end;
For in the vast confusion of it all
There’s love and there’s light, even vaster still.
While we shuffle forward with our eyes shut
We might once open them and see the sky
And see how eager it is to open
For us, too. We might look down and heed the
Soil, and remember how we sprung from it.
Writing a blank verse poem is a lot harder than I originally thought, but it’s kind of fun and rewarding to meet those syllabic “requirements” and when reading it over in its entirety see that is flows fairly smoothly. It gives you a little bit of a better understanding as to why an author/poet/playwright might go through the trouble of counting syllables on their fingers for their work so that they can create stanzas that are more structured and flowing (and probably much easier to memorize for those performing it).
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I think it would have been helpful if you’d marked the stressed and unstressed syllables.
For example, I read these lines this way:
Imminently towards a hopeless, fraught end;
For in the vast confusion of it allThe second line looks perfect. In my scanning, the first line is 11 syllables, but I can see a way to pronounce “towards” as one syllable.
Imminently seems off rhythm to me, although you kept the whole line trochaic. If you wanted to return it, maybe:
Toward an imm‘nent hopeless, fraughted end;
For in the vast confusion of it allIt’s hard!
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Let me compare you to the sharp winds of December.
You are more forgiving, fresh and wild yet still feared.
Wintertime is a huge thundery fight with relentless polar nights.
It seemed like opposite worlds, many thanking the heated house.
Out the window, white snow cascades over the wooden benches.
Unique forms of ice, frost flowers laid along the weeds.
Adoring the snow globe resting on the cast iron fireplace.
Hot chocolate had been sitting out, waiting to cool down.
Attempting to write an iambic pentameter poem was extremely hard, I initially thought that we would have to write a poem with 10 words per line, which was difficult on its own. Later did I realize it had to have a pattern of 10 stressed syllables. this project showed me how much effort Shakespeare put into a single line of his work
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A sign something’s gone wrong is that you have a series of syllables at the start of each line that are all unstressed (at least as you’ve labeled them). Since we only discussed two and three syllable feet, it should be impossible to end up with three unstressed syllables together in a row. And yet your first line has that . . .
It turns out it’s not as bad as all that and you likely had some idea, because I assume you’re alluding to one of Shakespeare’s more famous sonnets: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”. Since it’s the first line of sonnet, it’s already in iambic pentameter. Yours begins iambic, too, but you didn’t mark it as such.
For example:
“Let me compare you to the sharp …”
But later, to my ear, you start to lose the rhythm. This is how I want to say it:
“Let me compare you to the sharp winds of December.
You are more forgiving, fresh and wild yet still feared.”Until “winds of December” it works great and the homage is meaningful. The second line feels harder to say.
Here’s my best shot for fixing it:
“Let me compare the winds of sharp Decemb’r
to you’re forgiving, fresh, and yet feared face. . . “I like the alliteration of forgiving, fresh, feared, face that you’ve created!
You write about having some difficulty. What did you do to check your work? Did you check with friends? Look up words in the dictionary? Find yourself rewriting lines? Beyond your feelings about the poem, what was the process like?
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Blank Verse – Unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter-
The beach is my happy place
It is my ultimate time of peace
I put my feet in the soft sand
Slowly entering the warm water
The waves are very calmingly coming
Sunset is right in front of my eyes
Can Time freeze?
I am really enjoying this breeze
Coming out of the water I am relaxed
Thank you beach for being my stress reliever
Reflection
Writing this poem was at first difficult. I did not know what I wanted to write about or if it would have been good enough. Then I took out a pen and paper and put my thoughts on it. I realized how easy it was when you put your thoughts on paper. I wrote this poem with all my heart and it was not as hard as I thought. I thought to myself what place in this world makes me happy? The answer was the beach. The sand, the water and the sunset all make me feel relaxed. When I feel stressed out, I turn on beach music and it truly changes my mood to a better one. Even though I think this poem really expresses myself, I might have done something incorrectly with the stressed and unstressed. I got a decent understanding of this in last times class, but I still don’t know if I have mastered it. I tired to the best of my ability and hopefully I got it correct. This somewhat changes my thoughts of the way Shakespeare writes because it is challenging. This took me maybe an hour to think of so I assume that he really put thought into every stanza he writes but I am sure it was not as difficult for him because in his time that is how people would usually write.
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One reason Shakespeare didn’t come up with the phrase “happy place” is because it doesn’t follow iambic rhythm! So it looks like you wrote yourself into a corner. Remember if you’re doing blank verse, while the line will have 10 syllables, every other syllable will be stressed. You have a number of unstressed syllables in a row, which means you must have broken the pattern.
What about Shakespeare makes this work seem effortless? There is a quality of his work that makes us perhaps forget about the meter sometimes when we’re reading (sometimes! Not all the time. Sometimes the meter is all we hear!), so his form doesn’t interfere with his meaning, but we have no idea how much work he spend on each one of these poetical works, so we don’t have much evidence on which to base it being effortless.
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The greatness that are chicken nuggets, Ay.
Is Chick-Fil-A the best or not? Am I
so dumb for loving chicken nuggets, No!
Time stops when crispy nugs go dunk in, Oh!
It makes one glow with joy like Tatum back
in May when he put Bron on blast, kodak.
Is there a feeling greater than it, maybe
but nuggets never let you feel sad, no baby.
A partner might let you down but not nugs,
it loves you, no conditions, gives you hugs.
I tried to write an iambic pentameter in heroic verse. It took me longer than I thought it would, proving to be harder than I thought. At first I had no idea what to write with, and I kind of just went for the first thing that came to mind. It was hard to write because as I wrote, I had to keep checking if I was staying consistent in my pattern of syllables, and that was the hardest part of it. Having had little sleep the past week or so, I found it difficult to think and focus on the syllables and the flow of the lines. I wanted to write certain things, but then it would have disrupted the flow of the piece. I found it surprising I was able to write 10 lines about a seemingly random and ridiculous idea. There is so many possibilities when it comes to poetry and expressing oneself through words and life. It made me realize that poetry and writing as a craft is more than it seems, making me realize exactly why Shakespeare is so regarded in the literary world as one of the best. He seemingly effortlessly makes his characters and plays flow.
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I think your interjections are my favorite part. Ay! Oh! No! But they’re serving an important purpose, of course. Maybe it suggests something to me, further, about your state of mind! This raging debate about chicken sandwiches; you’re pulled in both directions. . .
Or maybe it’s just a poem about chicken nuggets!
These days most folks talk about writing as a “craft,” meaning it’s about making things fit, not just going to the store and buying two pieces already together. Sounds like you had a lot of experience with making it fit. You had these ideas for how the story would go but you were constrained by the rhythm. Some writers find these small restrictions make them more inventive–much like a craftsperson.
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Of modest birth, and rounded girth, the earl,
The servant, sits and waits. Upon his face
A grimace burns a hole within the wall.
(The painter had a knack for that—
He showed complete emotion.) Ah, a shame, to die
By hand of one’s employer. Lost of all
Possessions; stripped, though once, of course, bejeweled.
No grave for those bereft of Henry’s grace.
No tomb for men who rose to, nigh, the Sun.
But here, he shall be unforgotten… here.
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I found working with the meter extremely difficult, and it was difficult for me to find words that were unstressed or stressed and put them in the right place. As you can see, I got a bit fed up on the last line and lazily used repetition to my advantage. I was surprised by how difficult it is to actually write in a certain meter. I felt super restricted! I knew of Shakespeare’s genius before, of course, but now I certainly think of him even more highly.
I wrote the poem about one of Henry VIII’s closest advisors, Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex. Essentially, once Henry stopped liking him, he was executed. Interestingly, he was one of the few people who Henry actually regretted having had beheaded. I felt inspired by Cromwell after reading <i>Wolf Hall</i> by Hilary Mantel some time ago and, because I’ve been thinking more about the era in which he lived, I decided to pay homage to him.
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I think of most of the poems, yours most consistently blends content and form. You write about a historical event in the type of poetry that folks might have actually written with. The work you write about need to do, too, is apparent. When I scan it, it fits the rhythm nearly perfectly.
Your first line does seem to dangle a bit, though, as if it was orphaned. The comma doesn’t seem to actually lead into the next line. I wonder, did you mean it to be a list that includes the earl and a servant, in which case changing “they servant” to “a servant” makes sense to me. Or do you mean the first sentence to end with a period and be a sentence description of the earl (in this case Henry)?
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I fell in love when I looked into your eyes
Why did you never believe me
When I told you how much, I was in love.
Wherever I go, you are always in my heart
I wish you knew I can’t ever live without you.
But now that you have left me for another girl
I lay awake cold and alone, all night long.
Trust me atleast, when I say to you now
with all the heaviness in my heart,
I never thought we will be living apart.
Now I am living with an empty soul
Picking up the pieces of my heart, that you broke.
I attempted to write my poem in blank verse. Writing this poem was extremely difficult for me because I didn’t know what to write about. Also, I was having a difficult time understanding the meter and feet. I tried different topics, each verse and words several times and rewrote my poem. Choosing specific words that would follow the iambic rhythm was very hard, therefore it took me more time to write the poem. I had to constantly check if I had 10 syllables per line. Yet, I wasn’t able to follow the rule completely. I can’t imagine using this method in writing as much as Shakespeare did in his plays. He surely is very skilled and talented, and now I truly have understood the value of his writing and also others who used or still use this method to this day.
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I think you got bogged down in the difference between a syllable and a word. Many words are one syllable, but most are two or more. So in your first line, you write “into” as all unstressed, but it’s actually two syllables with “to” stressed (into). Yu also forgot the “I” in that first line. That means your stresses are more accurately:
I fell in love when I looked into your eyes
You double stressed “I looked” doesn’t fit the pattern, unfortunately and it looks like a hard problem to fix. I played around and while not very good, here’s a solution that changes the wording but (hopefully) not the sentiment:
I fell in love with your eyes, brown and deep.
Why you did not believe me I don’t know,
When I told you how much I was in love.
Wherever I go, I’ll hold you in my heart.
I wish you knew I cannot part from you.You’ll notice many of your subsequent lines began with a stressed syllable, which means you’re not starting with an iamb. In this version, each line begins unstressed. To achieve this, I had to mess with the grammar… and that’s why Shakespeare’s grammar can be so strange sometimes!
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The canvas started off colorless
There was no ideas flowing
Thinking long and hard about expression
How to express the right things,
At the correct moment.
“Color” does not mean reds or blues
But it signifies more than that
The world of art lies behind letters
Sometimes the world is dark
Others can be as bright as sunshine
My experience writing this not so well-developed poem was difficult. This poem does reflect the aspect behind creative writing and being a person who loves to write I did find this challenging. This was because when writing poems never concentrated to much of what we learned in the previous class. It made me very conscious of everything I wrote and I questioned myself dozens of times if the way I was constructing the poem was correct. The way I view Shakespeare writing now is that I truly applaud him for being able to natural construct such sentences. It makes me appreciate the talent he had even more now that I truly became more knowledge on the way his poetry is not only dissected but written.
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What sort of questions did you run into? What meter were you attempting? It’s hard for me to tell because you don’t mark your stresses and your lines are of uneven lengths. The first line is 10 syllables, which would imply you’re trying blank verse (I don’t see any attempt to rhyme), but your line doesn’t seem to follow iambic rhythm. Since you didn’t mark the rhythm, I can’t tell if you were thinking about it. Further, your second line is only eight syllables. The third is ten again, but then you go down to an irregular number of syllables. What do you think took your attention away from the meter? Sometimes content does, but I wonder in your situation.
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For we don’t know what is happening next.
I thought that maybe it was just me,
But I realized that it was we.
Felt like being born from different stars,
It had seemed like one of us came from mars.
We were tied together then ripped apart,
Sort of two broken pieces of a strung heart.Writing this poem was a new experience because I actually like to write freestyle poetry that sometimes rhymes on my freetime, but freestyle is nothing like heroic couplets in iambic pentameter because you have to be very careful on how many syllables are in each line and which ones are stressed. I started this poem with an idea of a story in the back of my head and as it went along, I couldn’t find the right words. I decided to take a break from it and when I came back, rhymes started coming to me and I just had to find words that fit the numbers of syllables and also matched the topic. I started off thinking I was going to write about playing a sport and describing it in detail, but I ended up with a story of two lovers that just didn’t work out. The most challenging aspects were making sure that every line made sense to the rest of the poem because I wanted it to tell a story, not just for a poem to jump around. I always viewed Shakespeare’s writing as very complicated, but now I realise it’s more of a delicacy, kind of like the high end of writing.
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I really like the last line! It almost seems like you were getting into some of the themes of the play. Or maybe it’s just that poetry seems to make people think about love. . .
Your poem shows that you were really working on getting the rhythm right, and marked as you have it, it fits iambic pentameter. I think you are a over zealous sometimes to break up words though, sometimes breaking them up into more syllables than they really are (I’m thinking specifically of your tendency to mark “that” as two-syllables). That’s just a function of getting used to how words are broken up. You could have looked up some of the words to see how many syllables they are, but you likely thought it was right! This is the catch-22 of writing poetry sometimes!
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Went to the hectic gym for fitness.
Lifted with fighters and was a business.
After lifting we had time to discuss.
Lifting with them gave my mentality such a push.
I am gaining from one who lifts so much!
At the end, I found ways to keep in game.
And we spoke about having fame.
Next evening , I changed and left more physical.
It was a great hour where I was very functional.
Maybe next time I will lift more professional.
I tried to write an iambic pentameter in heroic verse. It took me longer than I thought it would, thinking it was going to be easier than I thought. At first I had no idea what to write with, and I kind of referred to sources to assist me in writing this kind of poem. It was difficult to write because as I wrote, I had to keep looking back to see if I was staying consistent in my pattern of syllables, and that was the hardest part of it. I found it difficult to think and focus on the syllables and the flow of the lines as I had a long week of both school and work. I wanted to write certain things, but then it wouldn’t have supported the flow of the piece. I found it shocking that I was able to write 10 lines about an idea in which was mainly about fitness. Based on my experience writing this 10 line iambic pentameter poem, poetry and writing as a craft is harder than it seems, making me realize exactly why Shakespeare is so regarded one of the best in writing poetic literature. Even though his writing is plain old and boring he had worked hard in his literature and I respect the fact that he worked hard in which I inspire to learn from him so I can exceed in writing in this type of literature.
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That moment you describe, of wanting to write something but it not fitting is an important moment. It puts your brain in a different mode. When you sit down to write, you brain just strings words together and you get an automatic kind of writing. The words may not be the best one, but they fit at the time. That’s your “making due” brain. It’s your brain simply trying to get through a task.
When you run into problems, such as fitting something to meter, your brain goes into problem solving mode. It’s now longer working on automatic, but it’s coming up with creative alternatives. For this reason, historically people have used writing in poetic meter to make their writing better by giving their problem-solving brain more practice.
For the most part you fall into the right rhythm. It would have been more helpful if you marked the stressed syllables because I think you would have seen that your lines are uneven. In iambic pentameter every line must be ten syllables long. Some of your are eight, or twelve, meaning you need to cut back.
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There was a man who ate any-thing in sight,
His cat, his dog, and fish with all his might;
His car, her bike, a bite of my blue kite.
The man’s bell-y grew and be-fore he knew,
He could not bend to see his shoes.
The man grew round and rolled a-round you see,
No one could stop this plump be-ing at all.
He rolled o-ver a cliff and had a fall.
But thank-full-y he bounced back up a-gain,
For him hun-ger had had no end.I attempted to write an iambic pentameter poem in heroic verse. What I learned from writing this poem is that there is a science behind poetry. It isn’t just pretty words put together but its more. Shakespeare used many techniques to write his many plays and not many people are aware of that if they aren’t familiar with his writings. What I struggled with while writing this piece was trying to find the right words that would fit in the iambic pentameter.
I overestimated my abilities on writing poetry. It took me hours to just finish a couple stanzas. But I also enjoyed writing this because it did push me to think more and actually pay attention to what I’m reading. Now that I’m more familiar with this writing style I can’t wait to see it in Shakespeare’s writings and be able to identify it. As well as read the play and follow its rhythm.
I attempted to write an iambic pentameter poem in heroic verse. What I learned from writing this poem is that there is a science behind poetry. It isn’t just pretty words put together but its more. Shakespeare used many techniques to write his many plays and not many people are aware of that if they aren’t familiar with his writings. What I struggled with while writing this piece was trying to find the right words that would fit in the iambic pentameter.
I overestimated my abilities on writing poetry. It took me hours to just finish a couple stanzas. But I also enjoyed writing this because it did push me to think more and actually pay attention to what I’m reading. Now that I’m more familiar with this writing style I can’t wait to see it in Shakespeare’s writings and be able to identify it. As well as read the play and follow its rhythm.
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Hours to write one stanza of ten lines… can you imagine writing a five act play?!
It’s definitely something that’s hard and it makes you think about Shakespeare’s language choice. It explains some of his strange grammar and some of his vocabulary. Sure, sometimes it’s in pursuit of “beautiful words,” as another student wrote, but just as often it’s in pursuit of just keeping in rhythm!
Not all of your lines are 10 syllable long (your last line, particularly, stands out), so you don’t keep to the meter always, even if you’re definitely keeping in rhythmm most of the time!
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Summer is now over and I hate that;
I went to the beach and lost my red hat
The sea breeze blew it very far away
from my head and brought back by my friend, Ray.
The hot beach held a lot of memories,
full of my happy friends and loud birdies
But now, I have to go back to the school,
where there are dull kids who think they are cool
To all my classmates in my English class,
I apologize if this seems too crass.
I attempted to write my iambic pentameter in heroic couplets. In the beginning, I struggled while writing this poem due to not being able to find a topic. However, once I decided to just randomly write, I had to constantly make sure I had the correct amount of syllables per line. After finally completing the poem, I had to find the stressed syllables which I am still not sure is correctly bolded. The most surprising aspect was definitely the difficulty of being consistent with ten syllables. However, the most challenging was understanding what I was writing alongside if it was following the right guidelines and even now I’m still not sure if my poem is in the correct format. This changes my view of Shakespeare by making me respect him even more due to discovering how challenging it is to write poetry, especially in such complex forms. He not only follows the guidelines to poetry but also is able to create such great work which is analyzed even to this day. I was hardly able to come up with a poem, and I still don’t even think I wrote it correctly.
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The trick to iambic pentameter (and so also heroic couplets) is the regular rhythm. Every line will be exactly the same, five stressed syllables alternating with unstressed. The sign that yours doesn’t always follow rhythm is that every other syllable in your poem doesn’t get stress.
In your first line, I think “Summer” is actually trochaic. It feels more natural to me to say “Summer” (the dictionary backs this up), and you could probably shorten it to one syllable if you wanted, something like “Summ’r“. That means to start unstressed, you need an additional word. A determiner, like “The” will do the trick. So one way you might fix your first line:
The Summer ends; regret remains because
I changed “hate” to “regret” to fit the meter (it’s helpfully iambic), and it seems to fit with the story (You can hate that you lost your hat, but that’s just regret, right?). I also enjambed the line so it continues with the next. Of course, that breaks your rhyme, meaning it becomes blank verse. You might fix it with something like this:
The Summer ends; regret remains because
my fav’rite hat upon the beach lost was;
the ocean breeze it blew so far away.
But luck returned it back again by Ray.
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“Her blubbers of anguish follow and frighten those
Of the simple and young. The legend of the ‘Weeping Woman’
slithers and quiets the households of many
With a single echo of her wretched presence.
Yet, the very mention of this haunting being
Conjures a prickle of pity to poison me.
Certain to be the justice that she thirsted to gain, vengeance
Was given to a two-timing husband with almost no shame.
With a conscious now sticky with the remnants of murder
Of her children, only a living of torment to wander is hers.”This poem is a trochaic tetrameter that I found to be rather difficult yet rewarding to create. It forced me to discipline myself by adhering to the rules that are required for this specific poem, yet also helped me in finding a flow in my words and allowing me to discover different ways of word play. What surprised me was how much time it seemed to take for me. A few ten lines managed to take me several hours to complete in the form it is in now. What I found to be the most challenging was the process of searching for words that consisted of a trochaic pattern and also be able to create smooth transitions that made sense. I knew that in some ways Shakespeare’s writing is not something that can be easily done nor thought of, but this exercise definitely reinforced that idea for me.
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Troches as the opposite of an iamb; a foot composed of two syllables in the pattern of stressed, unstressed ( \ * ). Your first line, however, begins with an iamb. “Slithers” and “Conjure” are definitely trochaic, however.
Trochaic tetrameter is the hardest meter of from the options I gave you, in part because it’s not the way we naturally speak in English (we’re more used to the iambic pattern). That’s why Shakespeare reserves it for the fairies and even they don’t always speak in it. In content, your poem matches that quite well.
I don’t want to diminish, either, how often you do keep the rhythm. The trick is to keep it going (and for Shakespeare, over literally tens of pages!)
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I do not know what this will be about
I need to pass this class to get a mas(ters degree)
I’ll try to make some sense of this today
It will be easy they said but forgot
To tell me how extremely hard it is
To find some simple words then make it sound
Correct I hope proffesor laughs at this.
Line eight, I’d never thought I’d make it here
It’s almost over then I can be free
This is the last last one and now i’m done!So this was the absolute worst thing I’ve ever written because I had no idea what to write about. I chose to write in iambic pentameter in free verse. I first started off writing about a purple dog and it didn’t make sense so I wrote whatever came to my head. I really don’t know how shakespeare did this in all of his pieces, but now I understand why everyone loves him so much. This assignment also made me realize that i’m going to need a lot of help understanding these types of poems.
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Luckily the content isn’t important for this assignment, only the form. But I can see that you didn’t let it stop you (breaking the form to keep “masters” in there). In Shakespeare’s time, that’d be considered giving up! But you’re right, it’s frustrating to have a line nearly complete and then realize you might need to re-write it because of too many or too few syllables. One solution:
I need to pass this class for a degree,
I don’t see much of a need for describing the type of the degree, although it might have been important for you (in which case this solution doesn’t work).
More than anything, I think this activity is useful as an exercise in thinking about revision.
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The game was tied and the team needed to score.
The ball was close so we went for one more.
Our team was tired, the opponents relentless and tough.
Their defense was strong but we played the game just as rough.
The whistle sounded as a guy hit the floor.
That mistake was our chance and the crowd jumped up with a roar.
The ref pointed as we prepared for the last kick.
We chose someone for the kick, unaware of their plans to use a trick.
He backed up and waited for the signal to be blown.
On queue he ran and launched it through the air, making it under the other team and into their zone.
I decided to try the iambic pentameter. Trying to figure out what to write about was the hardest part in my opinion. Besides that, making words rhyme is not easy when trying to communicate somerhing through text. I made a scrap paper that has many crosses out lines and faulty rhymes. I think making it a iambic pentameter was the least challenging part of writing this poem.
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Rhymed lines of iambic pentameter are called heroic couplets. They were a particular favorite of Alexander Pope, who wrote entire non-fiction books in heroic couplets.
I think you should have used the bold to indicate your stresses. If you had, you’d see that your lines all have a different number of syllables. Iambic pentameter is five iambic feet; and iambic foot is made up of two syllables: the first unstressed and the second stressed. So every line of iambic pentameter has 10 syllables (5 feet * 2 syllables = 10 syllables). Since yours are irregular, you know you’re not writing in iambic pentameter.
So it looks like the rhymes took all of your attention. Maybe that’s one of the reasons Shakespeare avoids them so often?
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one day I’ll become what i dreamed the most
that when i have obtained, i will not boast
for now i will just have to wait and see
until the day to come and rescue me
i know that one day i will manifest
and have the clothes in which i want to dress
in the sports car that i want to drive
i know for sure that i will greatly strive
in that day i would happily see
until that time i wait so patientlywhen writing this poem i decided to write Iambic pentameter in Heroic Couplets. At first, i told myself that i was going to write in blank verse, and that rhymed lines would be to complex, however it wasnt as hard as i thought and it was fun having to be creative. One aspect i found difficult was having to remember to be in iambic pentameter and having stressed/ unstressed words
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One way to help yourself to remember is to show the stresses with bold (as I asked!). It is difficult, but you usually get into it after awhile.
When you write that you had to remember… what would remind you? Did you find yourself going back to revise? Did you find yourself falling into the pattern? Were you distracted by your content?
e. e. cummings was poet famous for his lack of capitalization and punctuation–characteristics your poem shares (and your paragraph!). Are you trying to reference him or, perhaps you have some other meaning behind it? Or is it an accident? It’s hard to tell how it would relate to subject matter in the poem, but maybe you have a reason.
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iambic pentameter
The yellow moonlight is dim on this night,
The wolves howl and wake sheep from their slumber,
Death is in the air and the stench is vile,
With nowhere left to go I run and hide,
Show my son how to hold the gun and shoot,
He’s crying and I tell him we’ll survive,
Demons whispering, “tonight we take you”
I see them through the foggy windowpane,
Evil in all of its absolute strength,
I leap into hell, and kick satan’s ass
This is blank verse which doesn’t rhyme in iambic pentameter. At the beginning I struggled because I was trying to make it rhyme, so when I stopped trying to make it rhyme, I feel like my writing improved. I struggled with starting each foot with either iambic or trophic because after a while it became hard to tell. I wrote about darkness and death because its what seemed most interesting at the time. I don’t think its very good but its the best I can do. definitely have to give props to Shakespeare because it’s not easy at all to write as clever and as skilled as he does.
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If you’re writing unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter it’s blank verse–Shakespeare’s go-to form.
In English, while individual syllables alternate stress patterns words do, too. Nouns for instance tend to be stressed. Determiners (the, a), conjunctions/disjunctions (and, or), and forms of to be (is, are, were).
For example: You and me–sounds more natural than–You and me (the latter sounds more like a question).
For the most part you keep the rhythm going well and your language is inventive. But you occasionally see your stresses end on these usually unstressed words and I think it can throw you off.
Your first line starts out great and then you end up on to be and a preposition.
The yellow moonlight is dim on this night,
I think you can fix the rhythm without changing the meaning. One way to do it:
The yellow moonlight, dim on this cold night.
(technically, that breath in the middle is a caesura)
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The canvis started off colorless
There was no ideas flowing
Thinking long and hard about expression
How to express the right things,
At the correct moment.
“Color” does not mean reds or blues
But it signifies more than that
The world of art lies behind letters
Sometimes the world is dark
Others can be as bright as sunshine
My experience writing this not so well developed poem was difficult. This poem does reflect the aspect behind creativd writing and being a person who loves to write I did find this challenging. This was because when writing poems I never concentrated to much of what we learned in the previous class. It made me very conscious of everything I wrote and I questioned my self dozens of times if the way I was constructing the poem was correct. The way I view Shakespeares writing now is that I truly applaude him for being able to natural construct such sentences. It makes me appreciate the talent he had even more now that I truly became more knoweldged on the way his poerty is not only dissected but written.
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I have a hard time figuring out what meter you were going for here. You don’t list it, or the indicate the stresses in the lines, so it’s hard for me to make suggestions.
If you had been shooting for blank verse, Shakespeare’s most common verse form, each line would need ten syllables, or five iambic feet. Your lines appear to be all different lengths which resembles free verse.
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