Poetry is a particular art form that is used for it's artistic and semantic content.
Poetry differs from prose in that it conveys emotion and ideas through the use of literary devices which create a musical or incantatory effect. Not only do the ideas conveyed by poetry enter into the reader's mind it touches the senses of sight, and sound. The nature of poetry is to use linguistic form instead of pure language. Poems rely heavily on imagery, word association, repetition, assonance, and musical qualities of the words used.
Poetry can come in many forms and many points of view.Three important components to poetry are form, sound, and rhetoric. These components are found in both Lord Alfred Tennyson`s `The Eagle` and Thomas Hardy`s `The Darkling Thrush`. The form Lord Alfred Tennyson`s `The Eagle` is a triplet.
This means each stanza is three lines. Each set of three lines rhymes therefore the rhyme scheme is aaa (hands, lands, stands). The form in Thomas Hardy`s `The Darkling Thrush` is 4 stanzas, each with 8 lines. This is what called an octave. The lines changes between having 4 and 3 stressed syllables.
This is called tetrameter and trimeter. Since the lines also follow a form of having one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable, this is called iambic. While Hardy's form is much more complicated then Tennyson's both types of form allow for the poetry to rhyme and have a lyrical tone to each. Alliteration and repetition plays a key role in the sound of poetry.
In 'The Eagle', in stanza one the “c” sound is repeated (clasps, crag, and close) and the “l” sound (lonely lands). In stanza two there is a repetition of the “w” sound (wrinkled, watches, and walls).This adds a sense of movement to the poem which parallels the smooth and quick action of the eagle. In 'The Darklin Thrush' stanza two repeats the “c” sound (century, corpse, crypt, cloudy, canopy). In stanza three Hardy uses words which create the illusion of the fluttering of birds wings (thrush, frail, gaunt, small). In 'The Darkling Thrush' rhetoric takes the form of both simile and metaphor.
In line 5-6, “The tangled bine-stems scored the sky / Like strings of broken lyres. ” In line 10, “His crypt the cloudy canopy. ” The rhetoric in 'The Eagle' comes in the form of personification.The eagles feet are “crooked hands” (line 1), and “ The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls” (line 4).
Hardy and Tennyson take difference approaches to the same topics. Each is consider poetry because each poem uses the general tools that poetry employs: rhetoric, sound, and form. 'The Eagle' is a short, fast pace poem that describes the action of an eagle. 'The Darkling Thrush' is longer poem which describes in detail the life and movement of the thrush. Though different techniques are used, the result in the same two poems which are beautiful and written with classical skill that has stood the test of time.
