Free The Everything Writing Poetry Book by Tina D. Eliopulos Page B

die;
And a grin of bitterness swept thereby
    Like an ominous bird a-wing .…
    Since then, keen lessons that love deceives,
And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me
Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree,
    And a pond edged with grayish leaves .
    The first contrast is found in stanza one: a frozen pond and a sun so white it appears to have been chastised by God. The speaker also notes a few scattered leaves “on the starving sod.” They have fallen from a dormant ash. Here the landscape mirrors the weary love between the speaker and the woman. He, like the sod, is starving for affection, but neither the woman nor the sun will nourish anything. Ironically, from this point on in the poem, the “we”—a collective, unifying pronoun—is separated.
    In stanza two, the woman's eyes, rather than focusing on her love, “rove.” Forget the notion “I only have eyes for you.” Their dialogue is not an expression of desire or affection but a “tedious riddle” that weakens their love further. The eyes and the lips, therefore, betray a love gone wrong.
    In stanzas three and four, contrast underscores the death of love. In stanza three, the smile is “the deadest thing/Alive”; the grin shows “bitterness” and foreshadows the end of their relationship. In the last stanza, love has not made the speaker happy; instead, “love deceives,” and nature, which is usually a restorative force, holds all the dead-ends and wrongs that “have shaped” his memories.

    Two ways to create contrast are to find opposing word pairs—like winter and summer or hot and cold —or to find one word that holds two opposing ideas, like the smile described in Hardy's poem, “Neutral Tones.” After writing down a list of such opposing images or words that hold two meanings, you can then use them in a poem.
    So, is there anything “neutral” about this poem? Not really. The title is the starkest use of contrast. This single moment in life ends the speaker's hope of love. But the contrasting title allows the reader to work toward a better understanding of the poem's content. Using contrast allows a poet to draw attention to her main focus, while exciting the reader's senses and challenging his preconceived notions.

Chapter 6
All about Meter
    R eading poems aloud will give you insight into a very important poetic resource: the stress, or lack of stress, given to certain words and syllables. You can arrange these syllables in such a way that you create rhythm in your poetry; this is called meter . Meter can give your poems a stronger musical quality—a cadence that gives shape to a line, a stanza, or indeed, a whole poem.
    Dealing with Stress
    When you speak, certain sounds and syllables receive stress—that is, your voice rises in pitch and volume, and you enunciate all of the letters. Certain sounds and syllables remain unstressed—your voice lowers in pitch and volume, and you blend, change, or drop the sounds of some letters. For instance, when an English speaker says the word television , she puts stress on the first syllable, raising her voice in pitch and volume and enunciating all of the letters. In contrast, the last syllable receives no stress—her voice drops in pitch and volume, the s changes to a zh sound, and the vowels i and o disappear between the s and the n .
    The patterns of stressed and unstressed sounds and syllables in English are very difficult to follow. Pronunciation has undergone significant changes over the centuries, and regional dialects and words taken from other languages have their own pronunciation patterns. Words can change their stress patterns according to their functions in a sentence as well. For example, the first syllable of the word reject is stressed when it is used as a noun (“I want the rejects sent back”). But when it is used as a verb, the stress is on the