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Summer in a Snow Globe
| Critical Analysis #2 |
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Summer in a Snow Globe |
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jlangholzj New Member
since 2008-07-17
Posts 8 |
Summer in a Snow Globe JWRL She listens to her "Self Conclusion", Durring the times she feels great confusion. Like the canvas it was spill't uppon, Her hope, alive, is all but far gone. He was the source of her upside-down view, his intent to create a world anew. Trying to fit the pieces together, He tried, her world, desperately to cater. What will result from two unsure hearts, they may never know until something starts. He wanted to ease the pain that she felt, She couldn't let go of her safety belt. Like the flakes inside of the plastic world, around and around the emotions swirld'. This is a crack at a sonnet, granted it has flaws, like 9 or 11 sylables. but tell me what you think. I've only done a few, and the only experience I've had is a AP Lit class. Thanks! |
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Bob K Member Elite
since 2007-11-03
Posts 4208 |
Dear jlangholzj, This isn't bad. What you've got here is a sonnet, though not your standard type. For example, most sonnets in English tend to be in five foot lines, and yours are four foot lines. However they're all four foot lines, so I think you've gotten the idea that the lines need to be the same length, and that your ear is good enough to hear that even though some of your feet run to three rather than two syllables, they still seem to group together. Many people never get that, and you have. Good ear, good sense of sound. You'll get worse and better over time, but in the long run you'll end up much better if you keep at it. You need to be willing to make mistakes and enjoy them simply for the places they take you. Also, in the long run, poetry isn't a crossword puzzle but a way of learning to explore yourself and your world. It's the exploration that will keep you at it long after the crossword puzzle part of it gets stale or becomes second nature. The rhyme scheme you're using is rhyming couplets. aa, bb, cc, dd and so on. This isn't the usual scheme for sonnets, but that's okay as well. You're writing an unusual sonnet here. If you were going for a more formal piece, you'd want to use a more formal rhyme structure, one to fit the three quatrains and a couplet setup that you've set out. This would be, for the sake of some completeness here, abab, cdcd, efef, gg. It's called a Shakespearian sonnet because he wrote more than 150 of them in one sequence and a few others that were scattered through the plays, simply buried in the rest of the text. His sonnets were all five metrical feet per line, as I recall. His sonnets are all very famous and widely admired, but I've never enjoyed them very much. I've always found them very dense, compacted and difficult to read, and the fact that they're filled with puns and jokes in Elizebethan English always made them more difficult and less rewarding for me. Many people simply dote on them, though, and they are gorgeous when they're read out loud. Odds are you'll find some of them you'll enjoy. Shakespeare's plays, however, are incredible, especially if you can find a good dvd performance of one. Back to your poem. In concrete terms, I'd suggest you switch the last two lines around. I think they work better that way. What do you think? And try reading your poems out loud. They should always make as much sense as a piece of prose or a text message or a part of a letter you're going to send to a friend or part of a conversation. If they sound stilted or funny/weird or if you think your little brother would have trouble understanding it (should you have a little brother), then it's back to the drawing board. Time to slap the silly thing around some more until it talks back in plain simple English. Or a close as you can get. Since sonnets are ornery, it isn't always real close. I hope I've been at least a little helpful here, jlangholzj. If you have any questions, let me know and I'll try to give you the best answers I can. Best to you, BobK. |
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jlangholzj New Member
since 2008-07-17
Posts 8 |
i would have to agree with you now that you say it, the last couplet would be better with the lines switched. When we did our poetry unit, we leared both the aabb, ccdd and the abab cdcd style. I have to agree with you that it isn't perfect, but then again, aren't they like cars  each one has its own quirks. One thing that we didn't go into much depth with is the length of the lines. explain that a bit, could you please?along the way we did do several shakesperian sonnets and his plays are phenominal! hamlet was simply amazing. thank you very much for the criticism, I don't write them very often, but I find that it i go through a tough period, it definately helps to write one. It especially makes it easier, b/c it comes from the heart about life experiences. -john |
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Bob K Member Elite
since 2007-11-03
Posts 4208 |
Okay, John. Before about 1400 and 1900, most English poetry was written in meter. We get that from Greek and Latin and French. Those languages tend to count the number of syllables in a line, and clump them into divisions they call "feet." If you're still interested at some future time, we can talk a bit more about how they went about doing that, but if I start with them now, I suspect it'll only confuse you. I mention it now only to give you a little history. In English, we still use "feet" to measure out how long a line should be. Do you remember when you were asking about the number of syllables, and if it was okay to use 9 or 11 syllables instead of 10? That's because you were trying to write a sonnet by counting out 10 syllables to a line instead of five feet. The actual requirement for a line in a sonnet is generally five feet, and not 10 syllables. What, you ask, is a foot? A foot is a single metrical unit. Let me give you a line broken up into up into its feet, and show you. This line will be a line with five feet to it, and each foot will be what is called an "iamb." "Iambs" are feet that are made up of two syllables. The first syllable is unaccented, the second syllable is accented. The difference is actually relative, of course, since if a word had no real accent, how would you say it, really? But if you look in the dictionary, you can see that some syllables in words are marked with an accent and others aren't. Here's the line, from a poem by Theodore Roethke (Rhett KEY) called "The Waking," "I wake to sleep and take my waking slow." It's a five foot line. The feet would be broken, if we were marking them formally, this way: I wake/ to sleep/ and take/ my wak/ ing slow. Each of the front slashes indicates the end of a single foot. There is a break in the middle of the word "waking" because the foot pays no darn attention to where the word breaks. It only cares about where the beat of the drum comes, where the syllable is stressed, and that is on the "wak" and not on the "ing." So there you have your five feet in that line. Let's look and see where the stresses fall, so we can see if the line really is both regular and iambic. Remember, "iambic" means the beat or stress is on the second syllable, and not the first. "Regular" means that that's the way most of the feet in the line are supposed to work. I'm going to use capitalization here to show where the accent or beat in each foot falls. There are other ways to show it, but I don't want to get confusing here. I WAKE/ to SLEEP/ and TAKE/ my WAK/ ing SLOW. If you want to mark it out for your ear, try hitting your desk lightly with your palm each time you come to one of the capitalized syllables. And that, my friend, is a line of iambic pentameter, the most common length and type of line in English verse. Ten syllables, and every second syllable is accented. It's a fairly natural length for English. It's not, however a natural length for French, which seems to like either eight or 12 syllable lines for some odd reason. This may be because French says that they don't have accents in their language, and, when you listen to it, it actually does sound like the ongoing flow of liquid, quite beautiful in fact, but, for me, it's always been somewhat difficult to pick out the beginnings and endings of words when it's spoken at a full tilt boogie. I suspect they have similar problems with us, though. In French, the 12 syllable lines (we call them hexameter or six foot lines) are natural. These are usually 12 syllables long. In Greek, their hexameter lines are often 18 syllables long, because the feet that seem to fit their particular hexameter best apparently are feet of three syllables length, usually called Dactyls (HIG-gle-ty/ Pig-gle- ty or one stressed followed by two unstressed syllables) and sometimes by another three syllable foot called an anapest (two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable, or " T'was the NIGHT/ before CHRIST/mas and ALL/through the HOUSE". . . That was, by the way, only four feet long, but it was anapests all the way, all 12 syllables of it. And there, John, is a quick and dirty introduction to "feet." I hope I've made things clearer instead of more complicated. Let me know, and I'll try to clear things up further if I've muddied the waters for you. Best fro here, BobK. |
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