STANZA

 

THE Stanza

( Prepared by S. Sreekumar)

THE Stanza

“The poetry of a people does not begin with the line but with the stanza, not with metre but with music”.

 Wilhelm Meyer, the German novelist, and playwright.

 

 ‘Stanza’ is first recorded in English at the end of the 16th century, borrowed from Italian. A stanza is a well-defined group of several lines of poetry having a fixed length, meter, or rhyme scheme; the scheme is usually repeated. In Italian, stanza means “a stopping place, room (in a house), lodging, chamber, stanza (in poetry).” The Italian word comes from Vulgar Latin ‘stantia’. (From Dictionary.com)

 

​Prose compositions—essay, report, short story, or novel — consist of paragraphs. All paragraphs in a composition point to the central idea/theme.  Each signals a new idea or may denote a change in tone/approach. They provide a sense of direction to the writer and the reader.  They also relieve the eye and provide much-needed rest when reading a lengthy composition.

 

RHYTHM

 

RHYTHM

 

( Prepared by S. Sreekumar)

ORIGIN AND DEFINITION OF RHYTHM

 

 Rhythm originates from the Greek rhythmos, which means measured flow or movement.  In an article entitled, The Nature of Literature, W. P. Trent endorses the definition of rhythm (provided by the Century Dictionary) as a movement in time characterized by equality of measures and by (the) alternation of tension (stress) and relaxation. (The Sewanee Review, Vol. 6. Johns Hopkins University Press). 

 

Trent says that words in a genuine literary work get rhythmically organized because it is a law of our nature for our emotions to express themselves rhythmically. We can experience the rhythms in nature in the movement of waves and the swaying of leaves. It is also there in the beatings of our hearts. 

PERSONA AND TONE--S. Sreekumar

PERSONA  AND TONE

 

PERSONA

ORIGIN OF THE TERM

 

The term derives from the Latin word persōna, meaning “mask.” It reached Literature from the Analytical Psychology of Carl Gustav Jung (the Swiss psychoanalyst and founder of Analytical Psychology).  Jung uses ‘persona’ in contrast to ‘anima’, which, according to him, represents the real nature of a person.  ‘Persona’ is the mask that hides ‘anima’, real nature. It is a “façade presented to satisfy the demands of a situation or environment” and does not represent the real personality of the individual. Daryl Sharp’s Jung Lexicon defines persona as a “functional complex” that “comes into existence for reasons of adaptation or personal convenience”.

 

METRICS-- S. Sreekumar

 

METRICS

 

Metrics comes from the Latin term metrica, an abbreviation of ars metrica or metrical art. Mathematics and physical sciences use the term frequently. The standard form of measurement of weight, length, and capacity is the metric system. 

 

The idea of measurement is not far-fetched when we speak of metrics in English poetry. Meter is the basic rhythmic structure of a line within a poem. It imposes a specific number of syllables, stressed or unstressed. Besides, meter governs individual units called feet (another term in measurement) within poetry. 

 

HOW TO READ POETRY--S. Sreekumar

HOW TO READ POETRY

 

“Learn about pines from the pine, and about bamboo from the bamboo”—Matsuo Bashō

 

[Matsuo Bashō was a seventeenth-century Japanese master of haiku. Haiku is traditionally a Japanese poem consisting of three short lines that do not rhyme. Bashō had written a series of insightful reflections on poetry.] 

 

The Encyclopedia Britannica defines poetry as literature that evokes a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience or a specific emotional response through language chosen and arranged for its meaning, sound, and rhythm. The terms—‘meaning’, ‘sound’ and ‘rhythm’— highlight the three significant features of poetry.  However, in the study of poetry, ‘sound’ and ‘rhythm’ are often relegated to the background, and ‘meaning’ gets prominence. Prof. Butcher (in his Harvard Lectures) points out the reason for the negligence of ‘sound’ and ‘rhythm’ in poetry: “The art of printing has done much to dull our literary perceptions…. We miss much of the charm if the eye is made to do duty also for the ear.” Without their vocal force, the words are only ‘half alive’ on the printed page, and the music in the words becomes faint echo’ (quoted by W.H. Hudson).