Essay on The Sacred Words: Elements of Poetry

Language is a remarkable thing. It can convey every thought, feeling, and emotion with perfect accuracy. Almost exclusively, language has taken awkward, unfit animals out of nature and made them rulers over the earth and many of its elements. When used well, it has the power to change an individual's view of the world, make someone believe they have seen something they have not, and even more astonishingly, look inside one's self and see what exists. If language is mixed with the tempo of music, something new arises; poetry is born. When words and ideas are set to a beat, they can far more subtly convey concepts that would otherwise need to be explicitly stated and the poem can be appreciated more as a whole,

Irony,the expression of one's meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect.

Homonyms are set of words which have same spelling and pronounciation but they have different meanings.For example play whichstands for both partcipitating in sport (1) and it also stands for a theatre piece(2).

Irony, a state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often amusing as a result. Throughout Night there is use of situational and verbal irony. This use of irony keeps the reader interested. The use of irony causes the reader to know things that the characters often are not aware of.

53. litotes- an understatement caused by the use of double negatives. For example, Toby Keith

As for the meter, it reminds Iambic Pentameter. Though, the conventional rhythm is broken by the author’s punctuation (exclamation points and commas as well as periods and dashes). Due to this device the poem comes closer to prose and sounds conversational. It was probably used to avoid song music mood and to give as much contrast as possible to the heroic poems of other authors like Richard Lovelace. If in Lovelace’s case the poem is to inspire the reader, in Owen’s work the rhythm is like a war, like death itself – hard, stumbling, hopeless, fumbling, and full of suffer. The reader suffers while overcoming all those hyphens and points inside lines. In this way, the two poems are on the opposite sides by their inner and outer sense.

This poem is written in iambic trimeter, which is a meter of poetry that consists of three iambic units per line (Wikipedia). It is also a tercet, a three lined poem that often contains a rhyme (Study). Hyland creates rhymes throughout his poem by rhyming words such as “cities” (Hyland 11), and “memories” (Hyland 12). This creates more emphasis on these words throughout the poem.

Verbal Irony is when words are used to suggest the opposite of what is meant. For example in “Night” is when

Irony: The use of words to express something different from and often opposite to their literal meaning.

He tries to convince himself that he is "a rock, an island" and he does not have to feel anything, anymore. The poem “I am a Rock” uses numerous literary devices. Among them are alliteration, rhyme, rhythm, metaphor and personification. Rhyme is the matching of the final vowel or consonant sound of two or more words.

A well-written poem would help one to engage into the work with their senses. One should be able to ask themselves what the poem caused them to think, hear, see, feel, taste, and to determine what he or she learned from the poet’s words. Many people believe that because poetry is an enigmatic art, and that there is no way for sure to know the

Irony is a method of the use of words that say the opposite of what you really mean, often as a joke and with a tone of voice that shows this(Hornby,2005,p1080). For example, the title of this short story The False Gems is an example of

The poem contains six quatrains, and does not follow any consistent rhyme scheme. Every line starts with a strong beat and ends up with a weak beat. The first and third lines in each stanza have iambic tetrameter, but the second and fourth lines do not contain any consistent meter. The feet generate a rhythm

poem is not merely a static, decorative creation, but that it is an act of communication between the poet and

Couplet: Two lines of verse which rhymes and forms a unit alone or as a part of a poem.