7/27/2023 0 Comments Dramatic monologue examplesIt’s not because I envy your happy life that I feel this way it’s because you are too happy in your happiness. If I’d listened to your song one more minute, I think I would have sunk down into the river of forgetfulness. Here’s a paraphrase: Listening to you, little nightingale, makes my heart ache and I feel a drowsy numbness pain my senses as though I’d drunk the deadly poison Hemlock or as though I’d drunk some other dulling drug to the bottom of the glass. (Did the average coal miner of the early 19th century know of the river “Lethe,” the classical river of forgetfulness through which the dead soul passed in order to forget its early life as it crossed into the underworld? It was one of five rivers in Hades.) It also has the most formal syntax possible, and allusions only educated people could get. It uses words that were unusual or specialized even in its own day. On the other hand, Keats’ ode has always been difficult. If you’d lived in 1595, you would not have had trouble reading Shakespeare. If you did, it was not because the language was difficult it was because the language is old. What should you notice about it? You may or may not have found the Shakespearean sonnet difficult. We’re going to be concerned with the language-which is the most significant feature that separates the ode from other forms. You can scan the poem and note the rhyme scheme if you like. This is exactly the kind of thing that makes students say they hate poetry. Here’s the first stanza of the “Ode to a Nightingale.” It’s intimidating even to look at: Students often find these difficult to read both because of the form and because of the elaborate language. Regular odes, such as those of Keats, are often composed in very elaborate stanzas. Let’s look briefly at two odes, one with a regular stanza, the other irregular. The odes we read today do not seem so public. In fact, from the late 18th century on, odes commemorating public events rarely survive the event of their publication. You will notice for example that Pope’s “Ode on Solitude,” is a short poem-unusual for an ode-and that Keats’ “great odes,” are about very private matters. It’s hard to come up with a better definition than that because the actual poems that call themselves odes vary a lot. The ode is a longer poem, serious or meditative in nature, commonly about events of a public nature, written in formal language and usually having a strict stanzaic structure. But most practitioners of the Ode in English have taken only some of the particulars of the Ancient ode to heart as they reproduce the form. Its origins are in the Latin poetry of the Roman Empire, and there its form is very strict. Some are very strict in form, some very loose. We’re not going to cover them individually. The Ode: The ode comes in a number of flavors-Pindaric, Horatian, English, Irregular. The subgenres, mostly subgenres of lyric, must still be recognized, however. “Dramatic” and “Narrative” being largely taken over by prose fiction. Most poetry today, however, is written in the lyric mode. This categorization of types held from the time of Aristotle (4th C. What had been the stuff of narrative poetry has become the purview of novels and prose fiction nowadays.ĭramatic, poetry told in the point of view of a character. Narrative, epic poetry, poetry that tells a story in which a variety of characters speak and interact. Originally poems intended to be recited or sung to the accompaniment of a lyre. Lyric, poetry written from the first-person point of view of the poet. From the 19th-century on, it has lost categorical force. It derives from Aristotle (who used the word “epic” rather than “narrative”). Lyric, Narrative, Dramatic, the ancient distinction, held until the 18th-century.
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