The next form is Narrative Poetry. These types of poems are more story based and are told as a verbal representation. They usually have a beginning, middle and end and contain characters and a plot. They also do not follow any rules with rhyming and can be any length. A really good example of this is a poem written by the famous poet, Edgar Allan Poe. You can read this below:
Annabel Lee
It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know,
In the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought,
than to love and be loved by me.
I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea,
But we loved with a love that was more than love,
I and my Annabel Lee,
With a love that the winged seraphs of Heaven,
Coverted her and me.
And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling,
My beautiful Annabel Lee,
So that her highborn kinsmen came,
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre,
In this kingdom by the sea.
The angles, not half so happy in Heaven,
Went envying her and me,
Yes! that was the reason (As all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea),
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.
But our love it was stronger by far than love,
of those who were older than we,
of many far wiser than we,
And neither the angels in Heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul,
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.
For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams,
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee,
And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes,
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee,
And so, all the night tide, I lay down by the side,
Of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride,
In her sepulchre there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea.
You can see the poem is a lot like a short story. It has a main character and a journey is followed from start to finish. It rhymes and is quite lobg but I have looked at a few other examples and some of them did not rhyme and were short.
You can see the poem is a lot like a short story. It has a main character and a journey is followed from start to finish. It rhymes and is quite lobg but I have looked at a few other examples and some of them did not rhyme and were short.
The next type is called a Didactic Poem. This is where the writer is giving some form of insightto work, usually involving the more practical laboured ones. You can see an example by Robert Hayden below:
Those
Those Winter Days
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his closes onin the blue black cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
Id wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearning the chronic angers of that house,
speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my goof shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his closes onin the blue black cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
Id wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearning the chronic angers of that house,
speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my goof shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?
You can see the poem has a theme about work but also incorporates the writer's feelings and other themes that are embedded in the poem.
Finally, there is free verse. This type of poem has no rules or boundaries to it. There is nothing that tells you what sort of structure it should be formatted into, whether it rhymes or how long its got to be. Robert Frost who is a famous American poet born in 1874 compared free verse to playing tennis without a net. Although there are no rules, the poems often talk about a feeling or a message that the writer wants to highlight for example modern war, the experience of heartbreak and how it gets better or a life message in general. An example of a free verse poem can be seen below:
A Different Kind Of Hero
A hero to me is not just a person who died for their country
or went inside a burning building or stuff like that.
A hero to me is a single mother who survives every day by herself,
A teenager against all odds getting through life,
An alcoholic walking into a rehab center,
A father being not just a father
but a friend, caregiver, subpporter, a brick wall for his kids.
A friend, who no matter what or how wrong you are,
stands up for you and takes your side,
A hero, who no matter how hard they are being hit or pushed or beat down,
no matter how bad they are emotionally or physically or psychologically,
they stand up and keep going.
They push through the pain of life, love kids, work, schoo, drugs,
sports, parents, heartbreak, alcohol; that to me is a hero.
A person who isn't just there, but is there living, breathing, and surviving.
You can see that this poem has lines at different lengths, they do not rhyme and it's not at a specific length in general. It is more about the fact that the writer is making a point that she wants to make. Although there is a theme running through it, the poem is a lot more direct and has no hidden agender, it clear talks about an issue that the writer is shining light upon.
When looking at all of these poems I feel that the free verse style would be a great place to start. I dont particularly want to work from the more obvious link which would be narrative poetry as I want to work on a message that I can later adapt with characters rather then having them involved from the outset. This research has been a big help to me and having looking at multiple examples of free verse I feel I understand it enough to write my own.
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