Poetry Lesson 3: The Lyric

Lyric Verse

While narrative verse is written to tell of heroic deeds and incredible tales, the lyric verse is written to express feelings and to stir your emotions. Lyric verse is also shorter and easier to follow than most narrative poems. Different forma of lyric verse are: sonnets, villanelles, minnesang, pastourelle, canstone, and stev. Lyric poetry is like a great song, where the poet makes a steady use of rhyming words and carefully aranges the lines within each stanza.

by John Keats

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art---
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors---
No---yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever---or else swoon in death.

Poetry Lesson 2: The Narrative

Lesson 2; Narrative Verse

Narrative poetry is one of the oldest, and may be the oldest, forms of poetry. It's used to tell a story and can be either long or short. There are different types of narrative poetry. The most common are: epics, romances, and historical verse.
Epics are very long and have many parts; many are as long as a whole book. Some famous epic poems are Homer's "Iliad" and "Odyssey", Dante's "Divine Comedy", Beowulf (author unknown), John Milton's "Paradise Lost", etc.
Romances are usually shorter poems, and tells stories about chivalry and classical mythology.
Tennyson's "Idylls of the King" is a good example of narrative romance.
Historical verse takes true stories and makes them come to life by putting them to rhyme. However, be careful, for they occasionally stretch the truth. "Paul Revere's Ride" by H.W. Longfellow is a famous example of a historical narrative.

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