Songs Equal to Poetry
““Poetry is dead,” playwright Gwydion Suilebhan tweeted Monday. What pretends to be poetry now is either New Age blather or vague nonsense or gibberish. It’s zombie poetry” (Petri). In this new day and age, such a bold claim that poetry is dead might not come as a surprise to some. It seems that other ways of literature such as music have taken over. Yet, at times it can be seen that poetry and music are similar and equal in their artistic value. Both use poetic devices that tell a story and relay a message to their audiences. The similar themes and use of poetic devices such as similes, rhyme scheme, and assonances in the song “Best Fake Smile” by James Bay and the poem “Finding Happiness” by Brian Spivey show that these
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The rhyme scheme of a song or poem sets the entire mood or tone for the piece. Songs and poems have a special form of language that is used in themselves and that is created from the rhyme scheme. As it is stated in “What Use Is Poetry?”: “A poet uses language as a painter uses color, a primary material out of which to make art” (Alexander). “Best Fake Smile” has a different rhyme scheme than “Finding Your Happiness”, but they in the end both do the same purpose. They draw attention to specific lines to get the point of the piece across as beautifully as they can. In “Best Fake Smile”, two lines in every paragraph rhyme, but there is no specific order as to which two lines. “If you don 't bleed it you don 't need it anymore / If you don 't need it get up and leave it on the floor / ” (29-30). This rhyme draws attention to the lines by signifying that if something is not as important as blood to a person then they do not need it. “Finding Your Happiness” has a more specific rhyme scheme than “Best Fake Smile”. The poem rhymes every second and fourth line of each paragraph to highlight how they relate to each other. For example, the lines: “Others claim that it 's the rain / While some may be looking for pain / ” (6 & 8), connect rain and pain to each other and how some people connect those things to happiness. Although the rhyme schemes of these two pieces do not seem alike, they are because each rhyme two lines of a paragraph to identify their significance to the overall piece. They move the story along and reveal a
Frank Ocean once said, “When you 're happy, you enjoy the music. But when you 're sad, you understand the lyrics.” Why does one have to be sad to “understand the lyrics”? Evaluating a song and being given the ability to relate enhances one’s respect for the composer. For example, when one first listens to “Danny’s Song” by Kenny Loggins, they probably believe the song is about love, however, once a person analyzes the lyrics the realize that the song is actually a story of a couple who are having a baby boy.
It gives the poem an uneven feeling, as if the lines were incomplete, much like how the soldiers may not feel whole anymore after an over-exposure to the brutality of war. The last word in each line of stanza five: “to-day … move; … eye” and “cave” do not rhyme, showing how a dead man decaying in the open is unusual. This stanza differs from the others since this stanza is the only one to have no rhyming pattern at all. Though the lack of rhyming structure in the fifth stanza would most likely be overlooked, the lack of rhyming happens at the stanza about the soldier’s decaying body. The shift from semi-regular to irregular rhyming exemplifies how the sudden change from normality is meant to create the feeling
These combined segments of the song are called stanzas. The difference between a poem and a song is simply that a poem set to music is a song, while a song that does not involve music is a poem. The poem “I Wanna be Yours’’ by John Cooper Clarke became a hit song sung by the Arctic Monkeys. The poem and song are similar, but different when comparing a poem to a song due to
The song I choose to analyze as poetry is J. Cole’s song “Hold It Down”. This song is from his mixtape The Warm Up, which is my favorite mixtape by him. This song is produced and written by J. Cole whose real name is Jermaine Lamarr Cole. He produces his own songs and writes them himself, which is one of the reasons why he is my favorite rapper. Whenever I am having a bad day, I always find myself listening to this song.
Poetry is a very unique type of writing. Poetry allows people to express their emotions in a way they feel comfortable. Every poem has a meaning to it, whether it is talking about food, interest, or a moment in their lives. Readers often mistake the poet as the narrator, although in many cases this is true. Many poets are the narrators and the poems are about their personal life.
Contemporary music contains several songs that numerous people consider poetry. The song “Happy” written and performed by Pharrell Williams in 2013 is an impressive example of poetry. The tone of the song is an upbeat tempo that has several poetic devices. Also, the theme of “Happy” is focusing on the positives of life, even in a negative situation. William’s practice of including personifications, metaphors, alliterations, and other poetic devices are more than just music and words.
When the author rhymes the story to give the poetic flow, readers are able to see what the author is trying to show. The rhyming may not be literal, but that way, readers can imagine what the poem trys to tell. In the last section,the goal is finally achieved. We can tell that the characters had to push themselves to reach this goal because it says “Hoping an inch of Good is worth a pound of
I see poems like riddles, that readers try to figure out, and interpret in their own way. Writers tend to write in code, they write in a way that can be interpreted as many things, and it’s all about how the reader understands it and to me that is so interesting. There are two things specifically to me that help a writer hide the true meaning of the piece, and that is symbolism and figurative language. Symbolism is so important in poetry because it allows the writer to tell a story without outright saying it. Symbolism helps hide the true meaning, however figurative language helps the reader get a better understanding of what the author is describing.
Regardless of this, the poem is famous for its unique rhythm and meter of poem. The poem flows very smoothly but does not have a specific poetic foot. Consonances were used to help the rhyme scheme sound more pleasing to readers. The poets diction was exclusive and out of the ordinary.
Authors utilize different types of syntax in order to more effectively convey their message. The way words are organized into sentences can change the meaning of a poem so authors, such as Naomi Shihab Nye very carefully format the sentences. For example, the poem, “Daily”, does not follow a typical sentence structure of subject action then object. Instead the structure repeats itself from line 1 to line 18 by stating the object first and then introducing the pronoun subject and the action. In line 1, “These shriveled seeds we plant”, the structure is the object, these shriveled seeds, subject, we, and then the verb, plant.
This is because if the poems had perfect rhyme it would sound like a song. These poems also have significantly different meter. In “O Captain! My Captain!” , the meter is iambic.
Poetry is a piece of literature where the author shares his ideas of a subject or person. He is attempting to allow the reader an understanding of his feelings regarding this subject. Most of the time poetry can be very pleasing to the ear; however, at times it can be written in a manner that is odd. Some poetry is written in a way that the reader can “hear”, “feel”, “see” or “taste” elements in the poem. Some poems may rhyme while others may not need to in order to convey the message.
Some have coined music as a universal language. Perhaps, the complexity of the notes, the consistency of the beat, the array of instruments, or the flow of lyricism offers this universal appeal. Nevertheless, the unique composition of each song enables it to sustain its own magnetic aura, much like the musical implication in Lewis Nordans Music of the Swamp. Though, many argue Nordans piece suggests merely a collection of short stories rather than a novel, Nordan uses his singsong methodology- a novel-in-stories- to incorporate an anthology of his transformative memory- an autobiography of the way it was.
The rhyme scheme is used in every end of word in each stanza for example: " in stanza one pear, ear, year, stanza two, word, bird, hear, stanza three, lug, smug, hug, in stanza four, goes, toes, knows. Every word in each stanza has the same letter in each
Rhyming serves the purpose of making a song more interesting. David Bowie begins the song with a scheme of AAAA, where he says, ¨So many mothers sighing¨, ¨We had five years left to crying¨, ¨Earth was really dying,¨ and ¨Then I knew he was not lying.¨ There is no pattern with rhyming in the poem until the last stanza, which used the rhyme scheme of AABBCC. He rhymed talk with walk, eyes with surprise, and lot with got.