Similarities of songs and poems

english teaching resource

1. Similarities of songs and poems Have you realised how much like poems songs are? • They are written in lines or verse • They are divided into stanzas

2. • They employ the same techniques like rhyme, repetition and they play with sounds to produce rhythm.

3. • Songs, like poems, have literary devices like simile, metaphor, personification and imagery. You may already have learnt the meaning of these words, in your study of poetry in the Literature text, “Let Me Be”. If you have not, take your dictionary and find out what they mean.

4. • The words and sounds combine to create the mood of the song, just like in poetry. The mood/ atmosphere may be happy, cheerful, excitement, sad, anger, hopeful, despair, and doom.

5. • Like poems, songs always have a theme or message for the audience. When you listen to a song you must try to get the message in the lyrics.

6. • Songs are composed to serve different purposes e.g. to soothe a person’s troubled mind/soul, to create awareness of different issues, to convey different messages or to present information in a more appealing and more memorable way, or to entertain and facilitate dancing.