An essay on poetry

Once upon a time, I was scared of poetry.  I thought it was silly, and that there was no true way to get a clear and consistent thought across using such a format.  Rhyme and structure, beats and verse....  Its all very daunting.

Then I tried it.  Its very easy to get swept up in a poem, and get side tracked.  One of the hardest things is to just go back and read it, and see if the flow works well.  Also tough to stay away from, what I call, the cheater rhymes.  The best example is The Tyger, by William Blake:

What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?




It doesn’t rhyme when spoken, but you can see how it kind of should on paper.  Some have said this was because the sound of the words changed sometime since the 1700s.  In the end, that irks me when I read it, but that poem is still one of my favorites of all time.

Rhymes can be a tough thing, because ideally you’d want a Perfect Rhyme, but those are so very hard to come by over and over again.  Most of the time I have to cheat to pull off a good rhyme, or at least what I consider cheating.

Syllabic, weak, or imperfect rhymes are too easy to fall back on.  Taking an ‘er’ word and finding another word that is completely different but still ends in ‘er’ are what I traditionally fall back on.  Or the taking a word that naturally ends in ‘ing,’ then finding a word I can tack an ‘ing’ onto to rhyme with it.

In the end, poetry can be tough, sometimes even rough.  But it is a fun way to make words play.  I hope my next poem is better, but I just don’t think I can rhyme forever.  In the end we’ll see, what my next poem will be.

Oh, one last thing, always be careful when writing poetry.  One time I wrote so many poems in one sitting, I caught myself accidentally rhyming for days.  Poetry is an addictive thing once you get started, I might have been scared of it once, now it’s a fun challenge that I simply sit back and enjoy.

–Dan