Poetry a Language Of Its Own

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Poetry: A Language of its Own Being a poet gives you the freedom to write anything. No strict rules to follow or a lot of punctuation, just the poet, his pen, and his imagination. However, it is also sometimes the most difficult literature to compose. The poet has every word in the world at their fingertips but sometimes it is picking the right words that can be the problem. Then, the words the author pulls so carefully can be put in so many different rhyme schemes, meters, and tones. With all of these choices to make, no two poems could ever be the same. In one of Shakespeare’s more famous poems, Sonnet 18, the poem follows a pattern. In sonnets there are four quatrains and one rhyming couplet. The rhyme scheme is that in every other line the last word rhymes to form a pattern. Another interesting thing about sonnets is that at some point during the poem there is a shift in tone or attitude. So as an example, in Sonnet 18, Shakespeare talks about how summer’s beauty always fades away and doesn’t last. Then in the last quatrain he starts the shift in tone when he states “But thy eternal summer shall not fade” (Shakespeare 9). Another interesting poem is Daily by Naomi Shihab Nye. This poem is called a catalog poem because the poem’s format is like a list. Not all poems have to rhyme. Many people have the impression that all poems rhyme but this is only because most Francis 2 individuals grow up hearing nursery rhymes. In a catalog poem, words flow together but most of the time there are few actual rhymes. The poem is talking about daily life and all of the work the author must do. Naomi Shihab Nye also mentions God in her last line “The hands are the churches that worship the world” (Nye 22). She is saying one of the best ways to know God is to work and use his creations. If an individual were to look at the two poems they would notice many

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