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43. Poetry out loud

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Poetry Out Loud is not intended to replace classroom activities like creative writing. In fact, the two naturally complement each other. For that reason, we have created a number of optional writing activities and lesson plans for teachers.

Do you have some great Poetry Out Loud lesson plans? Email us at mail@poetryoutloud.org to share your ideas!

For further ideas on poetry instruction, visit the Poetry Foundation's Learning section.

Lesson Plans by Eileen Murphy that complement Poetry Out Loud

Speaking Poetry: Exploring Sonic Patterns Through Performance
Students engage in a variety of vocal activities and performance techniques based on word sounds and then prepare a recitation for small group performances and compare their interpretative choices as part of the reflection process.

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Skip to main content Poetry Out Loud is not intended to replace classroom activities like creative writing. In fact, the two naturally complement each other. For that reason, we have created a number of optional writing activities and lesson plans for teachers. Do you have some great Poetry Out Loud lesson plans?

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Browse this list of poetic terms, including literary devices, poetic forms and techniques, and schools and movements.

Many of these brief definitions link to a longer page including a more detailed definition, example poems, related essays, and other resources. Many of these definitions are reprinted from Edward Hirsch's A Poet's Glossary.

Abecedarian: a form guided by alphabetical order in which each line or stanza begins with a successive letter of the alphabet.

Acrostic: a form in which names or words are spelled out through the first letter of each line.

Aisling: an Irish dream poem in which Ireland appears to the poet personified as a woman.

Alliteration: the repetition of consonant sounds, particularly at the beginnings of words.

Allusion: a reference to a person, event, or literary work outside the poem.

Anapest: a metrical foot containing three syllables, the first two of which are unstressed and the last of which is stressed.

Anaphora: a technique in which successive phrases or lines begin with the same words, often resembling a litany.

Annotation: the close analysis of a poem or text through written notes and comments.

Anthropomorphism: the attribution of human traits, actions, or emotions to an animal, object, or other nonhuman figure.

Apostrophe: a direct address of an inanimate object, abstract qualities, a god, or a person not living or present.

Ars Poetica: a poem about poetry, examining the role of poets, poets' relationships to the poem, and the act of writing.

Assonance: the repetition of similar vowel sounds.

Aubade: a dawn song that greets the morning while lamenting the end of the night, often concerning the parting of lovers.

Ballad: a plot-driven song with one or more characters and often constructed in quatrain stanzas.

Ballade: a form popular in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century France that contains three main stanzas and a shorter concluding envoi.

Bhakti Poetry: a form that began in India in the sixth century and traditionally celebrates love for and devotion to specific Hindi gods.

Bird Song: an important influence on poets and poetry recurring across cultures and eras.

Blank Verse: poetry that does not rhyme but follows a regular meter, most commonly iambic pentameter.

Blues Poem: a form that stems from the African American oral tradition and the musical tradition of the blues.

Bop: a recently invented form of poetic argument consisting of three stanzas, each stanza followed by a repeated line or refrain.

Caesura: a pause for a beat in the rhythm of a verse, often indicated by a line break or by punctuation.

Cento: a form also known as a collage poem and composed entirely of lines from poems by other poets.

Chance Operations: methods of generating poetry independent of the author's will to create unusual syntax and images.

Cinquain: a poem or stanza, also known as a quintain or quintet, composed of five lines.

Closed Form: a poetic form subject to a fixed structure and pattern; the opposite of open form.

Concrete Poetry: apoem that is as much a piece of visual art made with words as it is a work of poetry.

Connotation: the implied or suggested meaning associated with a word or phrase.

Consonance: the repetition of similar consonant sounds.

Couplet: two successive lines of poetry, often rhymed.

Dactyl: a metrical foot containing three syllables, the first stressed and the following two unstressed.

Denotation: the dictionary meaning of a word.

Doha: a form in Hindi and Urdu verse that consists of rhyming couplets made up of twenty-four syllables each.

Elegy: a form of poetry in which the poet or speaker expresses grief, sadness, or loss.

Elision: the omission, usually via apostrophe, of an unstressed vowel or syllable to preserve the meter of a line of poetry.

Elliptical Poetry: poetry that is oblique and without prosaic information or a logical sequence of meaning.

End-Stop: the use of terminal punctuation such as a period, colon, or semicolon at the end of a poetic line; the opposite of enjambment.

Enjambment: the continuation of a phrase or sentence from one line to another without an end-stop.

Epic: a long, often book-length, narrative in verse form that retells the heroic journey of a single person, or group of persons.

Epigram: a short, pithy saying, usually in verse, often with a quick, satirical twist at the end.

Epistolary Poem: also known as an epistle, a poem of direct address that reads as a letter.

Erasure: a form of found poetry wherein a poet takes an existing text and erases, blacks out, or otherwise obscures a large portion of the text, creating a wholly new work from what remains.

Exquisite Corpse: a collaborative poetry game that traces its roots to the Parisian Surrealist Movement.

Falling Meter: meter containing metrical feet that move from stressed to unstressed syllables; the opposite of rising meter.

Figurative Meaning: the associative or connotative meaning of a word, phrase, or poem.

Filídh: a historic rank of Irish poet who practiced an elaborate oral tradition and were known for their mysticism.

Found Poem: a collage-like form consisting entirely of language taken from outside texts.

Fragment: a part of a larger work, or a poem made to appear discontinuous or incomplete.

Free Verse: poetry not dictated by an established form or meter and often influenced by the rhythms of speech.

Futurism: an avant-garde movement in early twentieth-century arts and literature that emphasized technology, speed, and movement.

Ghazal: a form with its roots in seventh-century Arabia that is composed of five to fifteen structurally and thematically autonomous couplets.

Haiku: a form that originated in Japan, is traditionally composed of three lines with seventeen syllables, written in a 5/7/5 syllable count, and often focuses on images from nature.

Hudibrastic Verse: a narrative, humorous form related to the mock epic and consisting of eight-syllable lines and rhyming couplets.

Hyperbole: exaggeration for emphasis.

Iamb: a metrical foot containing two syllables, the first of which is unstressed and the latter of which is stressed.

Iambic Pentameter: a traditional form of rising meter consisting of lines containing five iambic feet, or ten syllables.

Imagery: language in a poem representing a sensory experience, including visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, and gustatory).

Incantation: a chant or formulaic use of words invoking or suggesting magic or ritual.

Irony: a rhetorical device involving contradictions of expectation or knowledge and divided into three primary types: verbal, situational, and dramatic.

Lament: a poem or song expressing personal loss and grief.

Limerick: an often comical or nonsensical form composed of five lines and popular in children's literature.

Line: a fundamental unit in verse, carrying meaning both horizontally across the page and vertically from one line to the next.

Literal Meaning: the simplest and most obvious meaning of a word, phrase, or poem based on denotation and not connotation.

Lullaby: a song or folk poem meant to help a child fall asleep.

Lyric Poetry: a non-narrative poem, often with songlike qualities, that expresses the speaker's personal emotions and feelings.

Metaphor: a comparison between essentially unlike things, or the application of a name or description to something to which it is not literally applicable.

Meter: the measured pattern of rhythmic accents in a line of verse.

Metonymy: a word or phrase that replaces the name of an object or concept for another to which it is related.

Naked Poetry: free-verse poetry written without a set form and stripped of any artifice or ornament.

Nature Poetry: poetry that engages with, describes, or considers the natural world.

Negative Capability: a phrase coined by John Keats to describe the poet's ability to live with uncertainty and mystery.

Nocturne: a poem set at night.

Ode: a lyric address to an event, a person, or a thing not present.

Onomatopoeia: the use of language that sounds like the thing or action it describes.

Open Form: a poetic form free from regularity and consistency in elements such as rhyme, line length, and form; the opposite of closed form.

Oral-Formulaic Method: a formula of repetition used by oral epic singers to allow for more fluent composition and memorization.

Organic Form: a form that is dictated by its specific content and not by a mechanic or pre-determined system.

Oríkì: the oral praise poetry of the indigenous Yórùbá communities of Western Africa.

Oxymoron: a combination of two words that appear to contradict each other.

Paradox: a situation or phrase that appears to be contradictory but that also contains some measure of truth.

Pastoral: referring to a creative tradition as well as individual work idealizing rural life and landscapes.

Persona Poem: a poem also known as a dramatic monologue in which the poet assumes the voice of another person, fictional character, or identity.

Personification: the endowment of inanimate objects or abstract concepts with animate or living qualities.

Poetic Contest: a verbal duel in which two or more contestants face off in a verse-based exchange.

Poetic Diction: the language, including word choice and syntax, that sets poetry apart from other forms of writing.

Poetry: a form of writing vital to culture, art, and life.

Political Poetry: poetry that is related to activism, protest, and social concern, or that is commenting on social, political, or current events.

Prose Poem: a poem that lacks the line breaks traditionally associated with poetry.

Proverb: a short statement or saying that expresses a basic truth.

Pun: a play on words or the humorous use of a single sound or word with two or more implied meanings.

Quatrain: a four-line stanza or grouping of four lines of verse.

Renga: a form consisting of alternating tercets and couplets written by multiple collaborating poets.

Repetition: the poetic technique of repeating the same word or phrase multiple times within a poem or work.

Rhyme: the correspondence of sounds in words or lines of verse.

Rhyme Scheme: the pattern of rhymes falling at the ends of a poem's lines.

Riddle: a short poetic form with roots in the oral tradition that poses a question or metaphor.

Rising Meter: meter containing metrical feet that move from unstressed to stressed syllables; the opposite of falling meter.

Rondeau: a traditionally French form composed of a rhyming quintet, quatrain, and sestet.

Sapphic: a form dating back to ancient Greece made up of metered, four-line stanzas.

Saudade: a Portuguese term expressing nostalgia or yearning for something that might have been.

Scansion: the process of determining the meter of a poem or a line of verse.

Sestina: a complex, thirty-nine-line poem featuring the intricate repetition of end-words in six stanzas and an envoi.

Simile: a comparison between two essentially unlike things using words such as like and as.

Slant Rhyme: a rhyme formed with words with similar but not wholly identical sounds; also called an off rhyme, half rhyme, and imperfect rhyme.

Sonnet: a fourteen-line poem traditionally written in iambic pentameter, employing one of several rhyme schemes, and adhering to a tightly structured thematic organization.

Spondee: a less common metrical foot in which two consecutive syllables are stressed.

Stanza: a grouping of lines that forms the main unit in a poem.

Stress: the term describing when a greater amount of force is used to pronounce one syllable over an adjacent, unstressed syllable.

Surrealism: a 1920s artistic movement celebrating imagination over realism and, more broadly, to the incorporation of fantasy and strangeness in poetry and art.

Syllable: a unit of pronunciation in speech.

Symbol: an object or action that stands for something beyond itself.

Synechdoche: a word for part of an object or idea used as a substitution to describe the whole.

Synesthesia: an attempt to fuse different senses by describing one in terms of another.

Tanka: a thirty-one-syllable poem, Japanese in origin, that is traditionally written in a single unbroken line but is better known in its five-line form.

Terza Rima: a form invented in fourteenth-century Italy that is composed of tercets woven into a complex rhyme scheme.

Tlamatine: a Náhuatl word for "the one who knows" referring to fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Aztec poets.

Translation: the art of transferring a poem's meaning from one language to another.

Triolet: an eight-line poem, French in origin, with only two rhymes used throughout.

Trochee: a metrical foot containing two syllables, the first of which is stressed and the second of which is unstressed.

Verbless Poetry: poetry written without the use of verbs.

Verse Novel: a hybrid form in which a narrative with structural and stylistic similarities to a traditional novel is told through poetry.

Villanelle: a highly structured poem made up of five tercets followed by a quatrain, with two repeating rhymes and two refrains.

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Browse this list of poetic terms, including literary devices, poetic forms and techniques, and schools and movements. Many of these brief definitions link to a longer page including a more detailed definition, example poems, related essays, and other resources. Many of these definitions are reprinted from Edward Hirsch's A Poet's Glossary.

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Dramatic Monologue 2nde British Section - view from my window

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Write your own Dramatic Monologue What is a dramatic monologue? Dramatic monologue refers to a type of poetry. These poems are dramatic in the sense that they have a theatrical

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The Purdue University Online Writing Lab serves writers from around the world and the Purdue University Writing Lab helps writers on Purdue's campus.

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37. Sample analysis -- Fire and Ice by Robert Frost -- OBQUIN method

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37. Sample analysis -- Fire and Ice by Robert Frost -- OBQUIN method

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From over 40,000 educational tutorials at Sophia.org

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Analyzing Poetry Using
SIFT
the
method
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
Introduction to Poetry
by Billy Collins
S
I
F
T
ymbols
tangible objects
that represent
intangible ideas
Symbol Sifting
just look for
possible
symbols:
check out the
title
check out the
objects
what they might
mean
comes later
mages
not just what you see
all five senses:
sight, sound, touch,
taste, smell
Image Sifting
look for big,
detailed
images
are the images
similar or diverse
?
igurative
Language
metaphors, similes
hyperbole, onomatopoeia,
personification, alliteration
colors, sounds,
scents, textures,
flavors
Figurative Language
Sifting
one /
heme
the writer's attitude
about the topic
lessons the poem tries to teach about life
always a complete sentence
Tone Sifting
does the writer seem
about the topic?
excited
disappointed
enraged
embarrassed
joyful
meh
sad
longing
broken up
jealous
silly
amused
Theme Sifting
usually your last step
put the pieces you found together
symbols
images
figures
sensory details
writer's attitude
what's the message
about life?
how do the comparisons work?
how are the comparisons alike?
what's the effect of the comparison?
PRACTICE
locate and write down
all the tangible objects
in the poem
PRACTICE
choose one stanza in the poem and
write a word/phrase description
for each of the five senses (add the information
from your own experience of what's described)
PRACTICE
on the text of the poem
underline any five examples of figurative language
and label what kind of figurative language
PRACTICE
for each stanza write a word/phrase
that describes the emotional effect
of that stanza by itself
PRACTICE
if the
topic
of this poem is "poetry"
based on all the evidence you've S.I.F.T.ed out
write one sentence about:

how should we treat poetry?

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Analyzing Poetry Using SIFT themethodI ask them to take a poemand hold it up to the lightlike a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into a poemand watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem's roomand feel the walls for a light switch.

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32. The Chimney Sweeper -- How to analyze a poem

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32. The Chimney Sweeper -- How to analyze a poem

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31. 
                Guidelines for Poetry Analysis

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31. 
                Guidelines for Poetry Analysis

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Literary Analysis Papers: How to read a poem

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6171 Helen C White Hall / (608) 263-1992 locations & hours events about contact colloquium blog

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How to Analyze A Poem How To - eNotes.com

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Poetry is a compact language that expresses complex feelings. To understand the multiple meanings of a poem, readers must examine its words and phrasing from th

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Carol Rumens's poem of the week | Books | The Guardian

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Each week Carol Rumens picks a poem to discuss

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It has been said above that much of the effects of literary texts depend on various patterns of repetition (see ). The kind of repetition that most people associate with poetry is the repetition of sounds, in particular in rhyme. Apart from rhyme, there are other sound patterns in poetry which create additional meaning, such as alliteration, assonance and onomatopoeia. Such sound effects always have a specific function in a poem. It is the task of analysis to explicate such functions, because they, too, are part of what the poem means, its overall and specific effects.

When two words have the same sound (phoneme) from the last stressed vowel onwards, they are considered to rhyme. In a full rhyme, the consonant preceding the last stressed vowel of the two words is different: n ight/del ight, p ower/fl ower and so on.

There are a number of rhyme forms that deviate from the exact observance of the full rhyme.

One talks about a rich rhyme when the consonant before the last stressed vowel is identical: lap/c lap, stick/ecclesia stic. When the two rhyme words are in fact the same, it is an identical rhyme. When two rhyme words look and sound the same but have different meanings this is called a homonym. Both rich rhyme and identical rhyme have at times been considered bad form.

Sometimes, only the consonants or only the vowel sounds are identical. In such cases one speaks of half-rhymes, slant rhymes or pararhymes:

reader/rider ( consonance: same consonants but different stressed vowel)
poppet/profit, forever/weather ( assonance: same vowels, different consonants)
opposite/spite, home/come ( eye-rhyme: spelling identical but pronunciation different)

The most noticeable rhyme is the rhyme at the end of a line, the end-rhyme. But there are also lines within lines, so-called internal rhymes.

I've a head like a concertina; I've a tongue like a button-stick,
I've a mouth like an old potato, and I'm more than a little sick, Barrack-Room Ballads)
B ut I've had my fun o' the Corp'ral's Guards: I've made the cinders fly,
And I'm here in the Clink for a thundering drink and blacking the
Corporal's eye.
(From: Kipling

Rudyard Kipling: English poet, short-story writer, and novelist. Born in India. 1865-1936.

When a word in the middle of the line (usually before a caesura) rhymes with the word at the end of the line it is a leonine rhyme.

The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea,
In a beautiful pea-green boat. The Owl and the Pussy-Cat)
They took some honey, and plenty of money
Wrapped up in a five-pound note.
(From: Lear

Edward Lear: English humorist and painter. 1812-1888.

Rhymes can be on one syllable or on two or three syllables. Rhymes of one identical syllable are called masculine rhymes: street/meet, man/ban, galaxy/merrily. Rhymes of two identical syllables are called feminine rhymes: straining/complaining, slowly/holy. Very rarely there are rhymes with three identical syllables, so-called triple rhymes: icicles/bicycles. The triple rhyme is often used for a humorous effect:

Her favorite science was the mathem atical,
Her noblest virtue was her magnanimity,
Her wit (she sometimes tried at wit) was Attic all,
Her serious sayings darkened to sublimity;
In short, in all things she was fairly wh at I call
A prodigy - her morning dress was dimity,
Her evening silk, or, in the summer, muslin,
And other stuffs, with which I won't stay puzzling.
(From: Byron

George Gordon Lord Byron: English romantic poet. 1788-1824.

Rhyming lines can be arranged according to different patterns. The same rhymes are marked using small letters of the alphabet:

Sound patterns, especially rhyme, help to divide a poem into sections. These sections can help, for instance, to mark various stages of thematic development in a poem: the movement from despair to hope, from description to moral application and so on. This is notably the case in , where the octet and the sestet or the quatrains and the final couplet often form a contrast.

Apart from rhyme, there are other sound patterns that are remarkable in poetry and that are often used to link words which would not otherwise be connected (see also the List of Rhetorical Devices ). These connections create meaning patterns. Three of these sound patterns shall be considered in more detail here: alliteration, assonance and onomatopoeia.

An alliteration is the repetition of the same sound, usually a consonant, at the beginning of words or stressed syllables in close proximity.

But my grandest creation, as history will tell,
Was Firefrorefiddle, the Fiend of the Fell.
(From: Eliot, Book of Practical Cats)

An assonance is the repetition of the same vowel sound in the stressed syllables of words in close proximity, while the consonants differ:

Rend with tremendous Sound your ears asunder,
With Gun, Drum, Trumpet, Blunderbuss & Thunder
(From: Pope, Imitations of Horace, Ep. II.i)

In these lines Pope also achieves an onomatopoetic effect, since the accumulations of the dark and booming u-sound combinations imitate the "tremendous Sound" of gun, drum, etc. It should be noted that onomatopoeia only ever works in conjunction with the meaning of the words used. One cannot recognise onomatopoeia in a language one does not understand. This has been famously demonstrated by John Crowe Ransom who changed Tennyson's onomatopoetic line "A murmuring of innumerable bees" into "A murdering of innumerable beeves". Even though only two small changes have been made to the sound, the meaning of the sentence is completely changed and no onomatopoetic effect whatsoever remains (cited in Abrams 1999: 199).

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It has been said above that much of the effects of literary texts depend on various patterns of repetition (see ). The kind of repetition that most people associate with poetry is the repetition of sounds, in particular in rhyme. Apart from rhyme, there are other sound patterns in poetry which create additional meaning, such as alliteration, assonance and onomatopoeia.

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Explaining the most basic forms of poetic feet. Iambs, Trochees, Anapaests and dactyls.

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Studying Form, Rhythm and Meter, and Rhyme

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This video coaches students through understanding the form of poetry, how to break words apart to see a line's rhythm and meter, and how to apply rhyme scheme.

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"Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven" by W.B. Yeats, recited by Anthony Hopkins

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Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half light, I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams. Audio: 84 Charing Cross Road [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090570/] Video: Sloan Digital Sky Survey [http://www.sdss3.org/press/dr9.php] Original video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08LBltePDZw

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20. Dylan Thomas -- Do not go gentle into that night

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20. Dylan Thomas -- Do not go gentle into that night

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Dylan Thomas reciting his villanelle 'Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night'

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An introductory lecture on poetry for ENGL 100

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What is poetry?

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about

About this Poem

"The Arid Land" appears in Laughing Horse, no. 14 (August, 1927). In " Laughing Horse Magazine and Regional Modernism in New Mexico," Daniel Worden, associate professor in the college of art and design at the Rochester Institute of Technology, writes, "The three- stanza poem moves from a description of the desert as a place of death and waste to an affectionate, if hesitant, recognition.[. . .] [Lynn] Riggs does not romanticize the landscape. Instead, the landscape is recognized as a hostile wasteland, but there is nonetheless something to 'love' in the desolation and defiance connoted by the arid land."

There will be willows plunging
Their bloodless roots in air
And the hard crooked flying
Of buzzards circled there.

About the treeless wastes
No sand may ever heap
With water, nothing will run
And nothing creep.

Arid, desolate, defiant
Under its iron band
Of sky, we yet may love
This so sunny land.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on November 5, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.

One does such work as one will not,
And well each knows the right;
Though the white storm howls, or the sun is hot,
The black must serve the white.
And it's, oh, for the white man's softening flesh,
While the black man's muscles grow!
Well I know which grows the mightier,

O, rich young lord, thou ridest by
With looks of high disdain;
It chafes me not thy title high,
Thy blood of oldest strain.
The lady riding at thy side
Is but in name thy promised bride.
Ride on, young lord, ride on!

I'm in my room writing
speaking in myself
& I hear you
move down the hallway
to water your plants

I write truth on the page
I strike the word over & over
yet I worry you'll pour too much water on the plants
& the water will overflow onto the books
ruining them

If I can't speak out of myself
how can I tell you I don't care about the plants?
how can I tell you I don't care if the books get wet?

I have folded my sorrows into the mantle of summer night,
Assigning each brief storm its allotted space in time,
Quietly pursuing catastrophic histories buried in my eyes.
And yes, the world is not some unplayed Cosmic Game,
And the sun is still ninety-three million miles from me,
And in the imaginary forest, the shingled hippo becomes the gray unicorn.
No, my traffic is not with addled keepers of yesterday's disasters,
Seekers of manifest disembowelment on shafts of yesterday's pains.

New York, NY (October 12, 2023)-The Academy of American Poets announces its Fall and Winter season of in-person, virtual, and hybrid readings and c

Listen to a short Q&A where Steve Bellin-Oka discusses his curatorial process for Poem-a-Day.

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Home The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets.

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Find popular poems of all types and more at PoetrySoup: the poetry community and website with the most features in the world. Share the best poems with friends and family. Research famous poets, and access free poetry resources. Submit your poems and receive comments from an international poet's community.

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Poetry.org is a resource site for poetry and poets. Here you can learn about the history, meaning, and types of poetry, as well as terms often used when reading and studying poetry. There is also the resource page: a series of links to various poetry sites for daily poetry, poetry organizations, poet biographies, and more.

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The Favorite Poem Project A partnership between Boston University, the Library of Congress, and other organizations, with original funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.

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Adventure novel. A novel where exciting events are more important than character development and sometimes theme. Adventure novels are sometimes described as "fiction" rather than "literature" in order to distinguish books designed for mere entertainment rather than thematic importance. Examples:

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about

About this Poem

"The Arid Land" appears in Laughing Horse, no. 14 (August, 1927). In " Laughing Horse Magazine and Regional Modernism in New Mexico," Daniel Worden, associate professor in the college of art and design at the Rochester Institute of Technology, writes, "The three- stanza poem moves from a description of the desert as a place of death and waste to an affectionate, if hesitant, recognition.[. . .] [Lynn] Riggs does not romanticize the landscape. Instead, the landscape is recognized as a hostile wasteland, but there is nonetheless something to 'love' in the desolation and defiance connoted by the arid land."

There will be willows plunging
Their bloodless roots in air
And the hard crooked flying
Of buzzards circled there.

About the treeless wastes
No sand may ever heap
With water, nothing will run
And nothing creep.

Arid, desolate, defiant
Under its iron band
Of sky, we yet may love
This so sunny land.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on November 5, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.

One does such work as one will not,
And well each knows the right;
Though the white storm howls, or the sun is hot,
The black must serve the white.
And it's, oh, for the white man's softening flesh,
While the black man's muscles grow!
Well I know which grows the mightier,

O, rich young lord, thou ridest by
With looks of high disdain;
It chafes me not thy title high,
Thy blood of oldest strain.
The lady riding at thy side
Is but in name thy promised bride.
Ride on, young lord, ride on!

I'm in my room writing
speaking in myself
& I hear you
move down the hallway
to water your plants

I write truth on the page
I strike the word over & over
yet I worry you'll pour too much water on the plants
& the water will overflow onto the books
ruining them

If I can't speak out of myself
how can I tell you I don't care about the plants?
how can I tell you I don't care if the books get wet?

I have folded my sorrows into the mantle of summer night,
Assigning each brief storm its allotted space in time,
Quietly pursuing catastrophic histories buried in my eyes.
And yes, the world is not some unplayed Cosmic Game,
And the sun is still ninety-three million miles from me,
And in the imaginary forest, the shingled hippo becomes the gray unicorn.
No, my traffic is not with addled keepers of yesterday's disasters,
Seekers of manifest disembowelment on shafts of yesterday's pains.

New York, NY (October 12, 2023)-The Academy of American Poets announces its Fall and Winter season of in-person, virtual, and hybrid readings and c

Listen to a short Q&A where Steve Bellin-Oka discusses his curatorial process for Poem-a-Day.

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Home The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets.

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Here is a pair of poems more familiar than many I've presented here in the monthly "Classic Poem" feature-familiar, maybe, yet with an unsettling quality that seems inexhaustible. As in much of William Blake's writing, what I may think I know, he manages to make me wonder if I really do know.

"Blake's poetry has the unpleasantness of great poetry," says T.S. Eliot (who has a way of parodying himself even while making wise observations). The truth in Eliot's remark, for me, has to do not simply with Blake's indictment of conventional churches, governments, artists but with his general, metaphysical defiance toward customary ways of understanding the universe.

The "unpleasantness of great poetry," as exemplified by Blake, is rooted in a seductively beautiful process of unbalancing and disrupting. Great poetry gives us elaborately attractive constructions of architecture or music or landscape-while preventing us from settling comfortably into this new and engaging structure, cadence, or terrain. In his Songs of Innocence and Experience, Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul, Blake achieves a binary, deceptively simple version of that splendid "unpleasantness."

In particular, the two poems both titled "The Chimney Sweeper" offer eloquent examples of Blake's unsettling art. (One "Chimney Sweeper" poem comes from the Songs of Innocence; the other, from the Songs of Experience.) I can think to myself that the poem in Songs of Innocence is more powerful than the one in Songs of Experience, because the Innocence characters-both the "I" who speaks and "little Tom Dacre"-provide, in their heartbreaking extremes of acceptance, the more devastating indictment of social and economic arrangements that sell and buy children, sending them to do crippling, fatal labor.

By that light, the Experience poem entitled "The Chimney Sweeper," explicit and accusatory, can seem a lesser work of art. The Innocence poem is implicit and ironic. Its delusional or deceptive Angel with a bright key exposes religion as exploiting the credulous children, rather than protecting them or rescuing them. The profoundly, utterly "innocent" speaker provides a subversive drama.

But that judgment is unsettled by second thoughts: Does the irony of the Innocence poem affect me all the more-does it penetrate without seeming heavy?-precisely because I am aware of the Experience poem? Do the explicit lines "They clothed me in the clothes of death,/ And taught me to sing the notes of woe" re-enforce the Innocence poem's meanings-while pointedly differing from, maybe even criticizing, that counterpart-poem's ironic method? And doesn't that, too, bring another, significant note of dramatic outrage?

Or, to put it the question more in terms of subject matter, both poems dramatize the way religion, government, and custom collaborate in social arrangements that impose cruel treatment on some people while enhancing the lives of others (for example, by cleaning their chimneys). Does the naked, declarative quality of the Experience poem sharpen my understanding of the Innocence poem? Does the pairing hold back or forbid my understanding's tendency to become self-congratulatory or pleasantly resolved? It is in the nature of William Blake's genius to make such questions not just literary but moral.

"The Chimney Sweeper," from Songs of Innocence

.............................................-William Blake

Click the arrow on the audio player below to hear Robert Pinsky read "The Chimney Sweeper," from Songs of Innocence. You can also the recording or to Slate's Poetry Podcast on iTunes.

"The Chimney Sweeper," from Songs of Experience

.............................................-William Blake

Click the arrow on the audio player below to hear Robert Pinsky read "The Chimney Sweeper," from Songs of Experience. You can also the recording or to Slate's Poetry Podcast on iTunes.

Slate Poetry Editor Robert Pinsky will be joining in discussion of Blake's two "Chimney Sweeper" poems this week. on the work, and he'll respond and participate. You can also browse "Fray" discussions of previous classic poems.

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William Blake's two poems called "The Chimney Sweeper" create art by keeping us uncomfortable.

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Here is a pair of poems more familiar than many I've presented here in the monthly "Classic Poem" feature-familiar, maybe, yet with an unsettling quality that seems inexhaustible. As in much of William Blake's writing, what I may think I know, he manages to make me wonder if I really do know.