LITERATURA INGLESA

Genre and Form: The Short Story

 Wilberth Chavez Chocce
 Wilmer Atencia Gonzalez
 HUGO Ernesto
 Verse Forms
 Verse form’ is quite a general category. It includes the technical combination of the length of
the poem, its divisions into sections, its rhyme scheme and its metre. A sonnet, for example,
has fourteen lines and it rhymes in one of a number of patterns.
 Some verse forms have regular patterns of lines, rhymes and stanzas but do
not have special names
 The English ode does not always maintain these sections but is generally an elevated address
to a person or thing (its subject matter) and written in an expansive, varied verse form.
 Why should we care about describing the verse form of a poem? One
reason is that form conveys the meaning of the poem, and another is that
verse forms can tell us about literary history – the way poetry changes because
of historical attitudes to what poetry is and does. We will consider both these
aspects in this chapter.
 Let us start with a very short poem from
Academic Graf ii (1971) by W. H.
Auden:
William Blake A
Found Newton hard to take, A
And was not enormously taken B
With Francis Bacon. B
 The individual stanzas, meanwhile, are short and often
quite terse, as if showing how difiult it is to mourn. The
ABBA rhyme scheme turns the stanzas in on themselves,
almost as if the poet is hugging his grief to him:
He is not here; but far away A
The noise of life begins again B
And ghastly through the drizzling rain B
On the bald street breaks the blank day. A
What is a Sonnet?
 Sonnet Form
 A sonnet has 14 lines.
 A sonnet must be written in iambic
pentameter.
 A sonnet must follow a specific rhyme
scheme, depending on the type of sonnet.
 A sonnet can be about any subject, though
they are often about love or nature.
 A sonnet introduces a problem or question in
the beginning, and a resolution is offered after
the turn.
 Italian Sonnet
 An Italian Sonnet is also called a Petrarchan
Sonnet.
 It includes an octave (eight lines) and a sestet (six
lines).
 The rhyme scheme must begin with abbaabba, and
can conclude with any variation of c, d, and e
(cdecde, cdcdee, etc.).
 The turn (volta) in subject matter or response must
occur between the octave and the sestet.
London, 1802
Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour: A
England hath need of thee: she is a fen B
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen, B
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower, A
Have forfeited their ancient English dower A
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men; B
Oh! raise us up, return to us again; B
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power. A
Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart; C
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea: D
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free, D
So didst thou travel on life's common way, E
In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart C
The lowliest duties on herself did lay. E
 English Sonnet
 In English, both the English (or Shakespearean) sonnet and the
Italian Petrarchan sonnet are traditionally written in iambic
pentameter.
 The first known sonnets in English, written by Sir Thomas
Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, used the Italian,
Petrarchan form, as did sonnets by later English poets
 An English Sonnet is also called a Shakespearean Sonnet.
 It includes three quatrains (groups of four lines) and a couplet (two
lines).
 The rhyme scheme is often abab cdcd efef gg.
 The turn is either after eight lines or ten lines.
 PIED
BEAUTY
Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple- colour as a brinded cow;
For rose- moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh- firecoal chestnut- falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers- forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
In this extraordinary poem (line 6) suddenly
interjects a spondee (‘all trades’). Why?
Because Hopkins’s semantic stress (the
argument of the poem) is upon the universal
benevolence and inclusiveness of God’s love.
His potentially redemptive presence is apparent
in every walk of life
and so Hopkins uses a spondee to
slow down the poetic rhythm and
hold our attention at the wonderful
thought of the possibility of universal
redemption in the locution ‘all
trades’.
All trades: that phrase potentially
includes you and me too
But such redemption is only
possible if we accept God into our
lives. And so the poem ends with
another spondee artfully isolated in
its own individual line in order to
underscore this need for religious
obedience: praise him.
SHAKESPEARE, RICARDO III
Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour’d upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;
Our stern alarms chang’d to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.
After a long civil war between the
royal families of York and Lancaster,
England enjoys a period of peace
under King Edward IV and the
victorious Yorkist faction. But
Edward’s younger brother Richard
resents Edward’s power and the
happiness of those around him.
Malicious, powerhungry and bitter
about his physical deformity, Richard
begins to aspire secretly to the
throne and decides to kill anyone
who stands in the way of his
ambition to crown himself king.
Where should the first
stress fall?
You could argue for ‘is’ (‘Now is the
winter of our discontent’), which would
stress that this state of affairs is really
happening. But I would argue that this
opening is actually a trochee, because
this soliloquy is given its energy and its
drama by Richard’s sense that he must
now begin to seize the day and begin
his Machiavellian manoeuvrings: ‘Now
is the winter of our discontent’