Republic of the Philippines

Department of Education
REGION 1V-A CALABARZON SCHOOLS
DIVISION OF BATANGAS PROVINCE
MALVAR SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL
POBLACION, MALVAR, BATANGAS

Quarter 1 – Module 2: Reading and Writing Poetry

Address: San Joaquin Road, Poblacion, Malvar, Batangas 09171601390

 What I Need to Know

Poetry is difficult because very often its language is indirect. But so is experience - those things we think,
feel, and do. The lazy reader wants to be told things and usually avoids poetry because it demands commitment and
energy. Moreover, much of what poetry has to offer is not in the form of hidden meanings. Many poets like to
"play" with the sound of language or offer an emotional insight by describing what they see in highly descriptive
language. In fact, there can many different ways to enjoy poetry; this reflects the many different styles and
objectives of poets themselves.

Finally, if you are the type to give up when something is unclear, there can be many different approaches to
examining poetry; often these approaches (like looking for certain poetic devices or examining the meaning of a
specific phrase) do not require a complete and exhaustive analysis of a poem.

After completing this module, you are expected to be able to identify various elements, techniques, and
literary devices in specific forms of poetry.

Elements and Literary Devices of Poetry

What I Know (PRE-TEST)

Choose the letter of the best answer. Write the chosen letter on a separate sheet of paper.

1. To be or not to be: that is the question

a. William Shakespeare b. Lord Tennyson c. William Butler Yeats d. Robert Frost

2. ‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all
a. William Shakespeare b. Lord Tennyson c. William Butler Yeats d. Robert Frost

3. I celebrate myself, and sing myself

a. John Donne b. Emily Dickinson c. Walt Whitman d. Langston Hughes

What’s New

READING AND WRITING POETRY

Poetry is a word composition arranged in a rhythmic pattern used to express one’s creative thoughts and
feelings through a specialized and heightened language
Poetry is a combination of words in lines, rhyme, tone, voice, theme, language and emotion which makes it
a creative means to liberate the poet’s thoughts and feelings. While one can freely write a poem, it is still necessary
to know the different elements of poetry. This is to create a poem that will make a huge impact on the reader.

CHARACTERISTICS OF POEM
 Expresses creative thoughts in much briefer way than a short story and novel
 Uses elements such as rhythm, imagery, verse and meter, and poetic
 Has a musical quality
 Has structure
 Is used to express intense personal emotions and experiences
 The content of a poem shows the universal truth and connotes a deeper meaning
 Does not use everyday language

ELEMENTS AND STRUCTURE OF A POEM

All writing has a specific structure. A text message, for example, is concise and may contain slang, an
email often follows the same format as a conventional letter, and an essay is written in paragraphs. These structures
contribute to the overall message or meaning of the writing.
The theme is the summarized statement containing the main thought or underlying meaning of the poem.
This is what the poem is all about – the central idea that the poet wants to convey. It may be stated directly or
indirectly. Do not confuse theme with subject of a literary work. Subject is a topic which acts as a foundation for a
literary work while a theme is an opinion expressed on the subject.
For example, a writer may choose a subject of war for his story and the theme of a story may be a writer’s
personal opinion that war is a curse for humanity. Usually, it is up to the readers to explore a theme of a literary
work by analyzing characters, plot and other literary devices.
Love and friendship are frequently occurring themes in literature. They generate twists and turns in a
narrative and can lead to a variety of endings: happy, sad or bittersweet. The following are famous literary works
with love and friendship themes:
 Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
 Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
 Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Tone refers to the attitude and mood of the poem. It is the overall atmosphere of the poem which
influences the emotional response of the reader. One way to think about tone in poetry is to consider the speaker's
literal "tone of voice": just as with tone of voice, a poem's tone may indicate an attitude of joy, sadness, solemnity,
silliness, frustration, anger, puzzlement, etc.

As applied to poetry, imagery is the use of words to convey vivid, concrete sensory experiences. The word
"image" suggests most obviously a visual image, a picture, but imagery also includes vivid sensory experiences of
smell, sound, touch, and taste as well. Imagery goes beyond mere description to communicate an experience or
feeling so vividly that it encourages the creation of images in the mind of the reader and readers experiences for
themselves the specific sensations that the poet intends.

Stanzas, referred to as the “unit of poetic lines”, are a series of lines grouped together and separated by an
empty line from other stanzas. They are the equivalent of a paragraph in an essay. A particular stanza has a specific
meter, rhyme scheme, etc. One way to identify a stanza is to count the number of lines. Thus:
FORMS NUMBER OF LINES

Couplet 2
Tercet 3
Quatrain 4
Quintet / cinquain 5
Sestet / sexain 6
Septet 7
 Octave 8

Other elements of poetry are rhyme scheme, meter (ie. regular rhythm) and word sounds (like alliteration).
These are sometimes collectively called sound play because they take advantage of the performative, spoken nature
of poetry. Common types of sound play emphasize individual sounds between and within words:

Alliteration: the repetition of initial sounds on the same line or stanza

Betty Botter bought a bit of butter
But, the bit of butter Betty Botter bought was bitter
So Betty Botter bought a better bit of butter

Assonance: the repetition of vowel sounds (anywhere in the middle or end of a line or stanza)
William Shakespeare “Seven Ages of Man”
“All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and entrances”

Consonance: the repetition of consonant sounds (anywhere in the middle or end of a line or stanza)
William Blake, “The Tyger”
“Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?”

Enjambment: the sentence continues into two or more lines in a poem

Langston Hughes, “Harlem
“What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten
meat? Or crust and sugar
over— like a syrupy sweet?

Oxymoron: is when apparently contradictory terms appear in conjunction

William Shakespeare “Romeo and Juliet”
“Why, then, o brawling love! O loving hate!

Onomatopoeia: words that sound like that which they describe

Alfred, Lord Tennyson “The Brook”
“I chatter over stony ways,
In little sharps and trebles,
I bubble into eddying bays,
I babble on the pebbles.

Repetition: the repetition of entire lines or phrases to emphasize key thematic ideas.

Parallel Structure: a form of repetition where the order of verbs and nouns is repeated; it may involve exact
words, but it more importantly repeats sentence structure - "I came, I saw, I conquered".
Rhythm is the music made by the statements of the poem, which includes the syllables in the lines. The best
method of understanding this is to read the poem aloud and understand the stressed and unstressed syllables.

Rhyme is the link between music and poetry. It adds music quality to the poem which gives the readers reading
pleasure. Rhyme is the repetition of similar sounds. Either the last words of the first- and second-lines rhyme with
each other, or the first and the third, second and the fourth and so on. Take a look at the rhyme scheme below:
I saw a fairy in the wood, A
He was dressed all in green. B
He drew his sword while I just stood, A
And realized I'd been seen. B

Internal rhyme occurs in the middle of a line such as the lines below: "In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud" from
Coleridge
"Whiles all the night through fog-smoke white" ("The Ancient Mariner")
“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary”

Near rhyme involves sounds that are similar but no exactly the same (not perfect rhyme).
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without words
And never stops at all.
- Emily Dickinson

NOTE: A poem may or may not have a rhyme. But having rhyme makes a poem sound better
especially when read aloud.

Figurative language is wording that makes explicit comparisons between unlike things using figures of speech
such as metaphors and similes.

Metaphor is a type of analogy or comparison without modifiers or conjunctions. One of the most famous
examples of metaphor is from Shakespeare’s play As You Like It:
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.

Here, the character Jaques states that the world is a stage, which we know not to be literally true. However, by
extending the metaphor, Jaques compares the lifetime of a human to acts in a play, with birth and death being
merely “entrances” and “exits”, respectively. Psychologically, the use of metaphor often expands the way the
reader or viewer understands the world around him or her, as it does in this example.

Simile is a figure of speech that makes a direct comparison, showing similarities between two different things.
Unlike a metaphor, a simile draws resemblance with the help of the words “like” or “as.”
A Red, Red Rose (By Robert Burns)
“O my Luve’s like a red, red rose
That’s newly sprung in June;
O my Luve’s like the melodie
That’s sweetly played in tune.”
Hyperbole is the rhetoric art of exaggeration. Hyperbole is a poetic tool that allows you to blow something way out
of proportion. They create an effect of large emphasis. Use hyperbole occasionally because over usage will totally
diminish your story.

Andrew Marvell was a 17th century metaphysical English poet that often used hyperbole in his writing. One
famous example comes from "To His Coy Mistress," where we can certainly feel how much he treasured her:
A hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast;
But thirty thousand to the rest.

Personification is a figure of speech in which a thing – an idea or an animal – is given human attributes.
Hey Diddle, Diddle (by Mother Goose)
Hey, diddle, diddle,
The cat and the fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon;
The little dog laughed
To see such sport,
And the dish ran away with the spoon.

Forms of Poetry

Poetry has been around for almost four thousand years. Like other forms of literature, poetry is written to
share ideas, express emotions, and create imagery. Poets choose words for their meaning and acoustics, arranging
them to create a tempo known as the meter. Some poems incorporate rhyme schemes, with two or more lines that
end in like-sounding

Blank verse. Blank verse is poetry written with a precise meter—almost always iambic pentameter—that
does not rhyme. It has no fixed number of lines.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
- Mending Walls (By Robert Frost)

Free verse. Free verse poetry is poetry that lacks a consistent rhyme scheme, metrical pattern, or musical form.
There's no formula, no pattern. Rather, the writer and reader must work together to set the speed, intonation, and
emotional pull.
"This is Marriage" by Marianne Moore is a great example of free verse poetry:
This institution, perhaps one should say enterprise out of respect for
which one says one need not change one's mind about a thing one has
believed in, requiring public promises of one's intention to fulfil a private
 obligation: I wonder what Adam and Eve think of it by this time, this
fire- gilt steel alive with goldenness;

Both blank verse and free verse are free from rhyme scheme. But, whereas blank verse does have a consistent
meter, usually iambic pentameter, that creates a du-DUM rhythm effect, free verse is free from both meter and
rhyme. It is free from the limitations of verse poetry.

Haiku. A haiku is a three-line poetic form originating in Japan. The first line has five syllables, the second line has
seven syllables and the third line again has five syllables (5-7-5).
"Sick on a Journey" by Basho is a great example of a haiku:
Sick on a journey -
Over parched field
Dreams wander on

Tanka is a Japanese poetry with 31 syllables broken up to 5 lines (5-7-5-7-7). Originally written mainly by
women, it usually deals with people or a response to haikus.
The leaves change color
When the fall winds start to blow,
Yellow, orange and brown
Are the colors of fall leaves,
Slowly falling from the trees.

Sonnet. A sonnet (sonetto, Italian for “a little sound or song”) is a 14 line poem, typically (but not exclusively)
concerning the topic of love. Sonnets contain internal rhymes within their 14 lines; the exact rhyme scheme
depends on the style of a sonnet.
‘I Do Not Love You Except Because I Love You’
I do not love you except because I love you,
I go from loving to not loving you,
From waiting to not waiting for you
My heart moves from cold to fire.
I love you only because it’s you the one I love;
I have you deeply and hating you
bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you
Is that I do not see you but love you blindly
Maybe January light will consume
My heart with its cruel ray,
Stealing my key to true calm.
In this part of the story, I am the one who dies
The only one and will die of love because I love you,
Because I love you, love, in fire and blood.”
- Pablo Neruda

Visual poem uses the page as a canvas to visually represent the theme, subject, or sentiments of words in a variety
of shapes and forms.

Acrostic poems. Also known as name poems, it spell out names or words with the first letter in each line. While
the author is doing this, they're describing someone or something they deem important. Here are two examples to
illustrate the poetic form.
 "Alexis" by Nicholas Gordon focuses on an intriguing woman he may or may not know:
Alexis seems quite shy and somewhat frail,
Leaning, like a tree averse to light,
Evasively away from her delight.
X-rays, though, reveal a sylvan sprite,
Intense as a bright bird behind her veil,
Singing to the moon throughout the night.

Spoken word is a poetic performance art that is word-based. It is an oral art that focuses on the aesthetics of word
play such as intonation and voice inflection. It is a "catchall" term that includes any kind of poetry recited aloud,
including poetry readings, poetry slams, jazz poetry, and hip hop, and can include comedy
routines and prose monologues. (Check
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B55rXPVPziA by Carlo Bonn Felix Hornilla for sample performance).

Techniques in Writing a Poem

POETRY TECHNIQUES – WRITING AND REWRITING

Behind most successful poems, there's a huge amount of rewriting. Every poet has his or her own way of
working -- there's no right or wrong method. But here's one idea for a process that you might find helpful:

1. Focus your attention on the poem’s subject, considering it from different angles, developing strong ideas about
it. Anything can be the subject for a poem. It's easiest to write a good poem about something you know well, that
you have experienced first-hand, or that you have nearby so that you can observe it carefully.

2. Don't state the obvious. Everyone knows that grass is green, and that snow is cold. If you mention grass, readers
will suppose it is green unless you inform them otherwise. It's not necessary to mention the color of the grass
unless you have something to say about it that the reader doesn't already know.

3. Don't force originality. If the grass is actually green, you don't have rack your brain for another way to express
the color just to be "different." Keep looking, focus on your subject matter, to find the real details that make it
unique, the hidden meaning.

4. Look for the best words to bring it to life on the page, to create a mental picture for the reader that matches the
ideas in your own mind. Don't start correcting yourself or editing too soon because that can stop the ideas from
flowing. Give yourself time to get everything on paper. Maybe sleep on it, then write some new ideas. When you
feel that you've gotten everything down, then take a look at what you've got.

3. Experiment like crazy. Try different forms, different angles. Try putting the ideas in a different order. Try
everything that you think might improve the poem. You've got nothing to lose -- you can always go back to a
previous draft. Compare versions; see what works better and worse. You might decide to combine parts of one
version with parts of another. Work to come up with the ideal version of your poem.

Read the poem (many students neglect this step). Identify the speaker and the situation. Feel free to read it more
than once! Read the sentences literally. Use your prose reading skills to clarify what the poem is about. Read each
line separately, noting unusual words and associations. Look up words you are unsure of and struggle with word
associations that may not seem logical to you. Note any changes in the form of the poem that might signal a shift in
point of view. Study the structure of the poem, including its rhyme and rhythm (if any). Re-read the poem slowly,
thinking about what message and emotion the poem communicates

What I Can Do

Choose one issue about the young generation today that you can observe (teenage
pregnancy, unemployment, out-of-school youth, drug addiction, etc.). Then write a spoken word
about your chosen topic. You should be able to point out the tone, theme, form and devices the poem
you have created. Your output will be evaluated with the following criteria.

CRITERIA POINTS
Meaning/Message 5pts
Organization 5pts
Word Choice 5pts
Originality 5pts
 Assessment

This serves as your summative test. Answer the questions below following the instructions given in each test.

Write TRUE if the statement is correct, and FALSE if the statement is incorrect.
1. A stanza is a grouping of related words of the same topic or thought and can be subdivided into the
number of lines it contains.
2. Tone is how the writer feels toward a subject or an audience.
3. Sound in poetry refers to the use of words to create tone, mood and images.
4. Rhyme are words that repeat the same sound.
5. The subject of the poem is not necessarily it’s theme.
6. There is only one rhyme scheme that we can use to write poetry.
7. Enjambment and end stops are the same.
8. Form refers to how a poem takes shape in a page or how are the lines arranged or presented.
9. Consonance is the repetition of the same vowel sounds in words near each other
10. The theme is the main idea or the message of the poem.

Directions: Read the poem and answer the questions below.

The West Wind

It’s a warm wind, the west wind, full of birds’ cries;
I never hear the west wind but tears are in my eyes.
For it comes from the west lands, the old brown hills,
And April’s in the west wind, and daffodils.

It’s a fine land, the west land, for hearts as tired as mine;
Apple orchards blossom there, and the airs’ like wine.
There is cool green grass there where men may lie at rest;
And the thrushes are in song there, fluting from their nest…

Answer the following questions about the poem, “The West Wind.”
1. In the first line, what is the literary device in the words “warm wind, the west wind”
A. onomatopoeia C. rhyme
B. alliteration D. rhythm

2. The words “my eyes” uses what sound device?

A. onomatopoeia C. rhyme
B. alliteration D. repetition

3. The poem is written in

A. couplets B. stanzas C. quatrains D. cinquains

4. In the last line, which word is an example of onomatopoeia?

A. thrushes B. song C. fluting D. nest

5. Line six has a comparison. is being compared to

A. song to a nest C. air to song
B. air to wine D. blossoms to air
6. Is the comparison in line six a simile or metaphor?
A. simile B. metaphor

7. What kind of poem is this?

A. free verse poem D. limerick
B. concrete poem E. narrative
C. haiku F. lyric

8. The sense of and the sense of are appealed to in the first line.
A. sight and taste C. touch and sound
B. touch and sight D. sound and smell

9. This kind of description which appeals to one or more of the five senses is called
A. similes B. allusions C. imagery D. metaphors

MULTIPLE CHOICE. Write the letter of the correct choice.

10. The repeating of beginning consonant sounds is .
A. onomatopoeia B. alliteration C. rhyme D. refrain

11. Poetry that does not follow a specific form and does not have to rhyme is known as
poetry.
A. cinquain B. free verse C. haiku D. limerick

12. is a type of Japanese poetry that is made up of three lines.

A. haiku B. riddle C. limerick D. diamonte

13. A group of lines in a poem similar to that of a paragraph; the way the poem is divided
A. alliteration B. repetition C. stanza D. simile

14. The repeating of end sounds of words is .

A. rhyme B. meter C. rhythm D. feet

15. Metaphors, similes, onomatopoeia, and personification are all examples of what?
A. figurative language C. both A and B
B. elements of poetry D. neither A or B
REFLECTION
Directions: In your notebook, journal or portfolio, write your personal insights.

REFERENCES
(n.d.). Elements of Poetry. Retrieved from https://learn.lexiconic.net/elementsofpoetry.htm
Collins, Billy. 2019. Poetry 101: Learn About Poetry, Different Types of Poems and Poetic Devices
with Examples. Retrieved from https://www.masterclass.com/.
Literacy Ideas for Teachers and Students. Elements of Poetry. Retrieved from
https://www.literacyideas.com/elements-of-poetry.
Samson, Maine. (2013). Basic Elements of Poetry. Retrieved from
https://www.slideshare.net/MaineSamson/basic-elements-of-poetry .
Literary Devices. (2017). Retrieved from https://www.literarydevices.com/.
Sweetland, Robert. Elements of Poetry – and Description of Quality Characteristics. Retrieved from
http://www.homeofbob.com/literature/genre/poetry/elements.
Victor, William. (2019). How to Write a Poem. Retrieved from https://www.creative-writing-
now.com/poetry-techniques