What is a lyric poem

characteristics of lyric poetry from South Suburban College

1. What Is a Lyric Poem?
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2. Types of Poems
(1) Classical—with meter
(2) Free Verse—no fixed meter

3. Classical Characteristics
Classical: a. meter
b. rhyme
c. stanza

4. Free Verse--Characteristics
Free Verse: a. No fixed meter
b. Any shape
c. Loosely cadenced

5. Characteristics
Poet portrays own feelings and
perceptions
Often about love
Other themes: war, peace, nature,
nostalgia, grief, loss, spirituality
When nature is present, often a reflection
or contrast of poet’s mind
Refrain is a common feature

6. Classical Examples:
Roses are red;
Violets are blue.
You’re my honey.
I love you.
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though.
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

7. Classical Examples:
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

8. Free Verse Examples:
When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed,
And the great star early drooped in the western sky in the
night,
I mourned, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
So much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.

9. Free Verse Examples:
Is there such a thing as “love” in modern consciousness,
or is there just the ripple of a little wave of vague belief
to the lying breeze of a cheater’s mind?

10. Types of Meter
Iamb (iambic) -’
Trochee (trochaic) ‘-
Anapest (anapestic) --’
Dactyl (dactylic) ‘--

11. Examples of Each Meter
Iamb: The best in life is yet to come.
 I’ve bet my loot that you’re my hon.
Trochee: Tuck me tight and let me sleep.
 Sheep just like to eat and eat.
Anapest: When the best of the people get slaughtered outright
 Not a good soul can sleep without nightmares at night.
Dactyl: Touching the fretting with tentative fingers
 Mark couldn’t bring out the best in his singers.

12. Types of Rhyme
(1) Perfect rhyme: run, sun; say, play; walking, talking
(2) Imperfect rhyme (slant-rhyme, off-rhyme)
(A) Assonance: pay, Kate; lift, grip; chosen, potent
(B) Consonance: cat, sit; wild, guild; pause, fizz
(3) Alliteration: Sorry I saw you slip in the sand!

13. Figures of Speech (Tropes)
(1) metaphor: John’s a bear.
(2) simile: John’s like a bear.
(3) metonymy: The press is hounding the princess. (Press is
short for “printing press” which is used to refer to reporters.
One concept stands in for another; they’re not being compared
as in a metaphor)
(4) synecdoche: Lend me a hand. (Part of something refers to
whole)
(5) hyperbole: I’ll love you till all the seas run dry. (Gross
exaggeration)

14. Types of Stanzas
(“Paragraphs”)
(1) couplet (Alexander Pope)
(2) tercet (Robert Herrick, “Upon Julia’s Clothes”)
(3) quatrain (William Blake’s “The Tiger”)
(4) rime royal—seven-line iambic pentameter rhyming
ababbcc (Shakespeare's “Rape of Lucrece”)
(5) ottava rima—eight iambic pentameter lines rhyming
abababcc (Byron’s Don Juan)
(6) Spenserian stanza—nine verses, first eight in iambic
pentameter and the ninth in iambic hexameter rhyming
ababbcbcc (Spenser’s The Faerie Queen)