A - Z of Poetic Techniques by Gillian Clarke

ALLITERATION
Alliteration is the recurring sound of a consonant. That is, the sound of any letter except a vowel. Just to remind ourselves, of the first six sounds of the alphabet, B, C, D and F are consonants, A and E are vowels.

Sometimes several consonants play together, weaving in and out. Alliteration comes naturally to all of us, including poets. Without even thinking of it we use it in nicknames, find it in comics and nursery rhymes. From my childhood I remember Desperate Dan, Korky the Cat, Lucy Locket. Advertisers exploit it. Poets sing it. Children chant it. Poets using Old English over a thousand years ago, and even earlier in the much older British language (Welsh), relished alliteration. Here are a few selected examples from the AQA anthology:

In Seamus Heaney’s poem, Perch, listen for the ‘r’ sound in ‘runty and ready’, and ‘f’, ‘n’, ‘l’ and ‘d’ in ‘the finland of perch, in the fenland of alder’. You’ll find such sounds in almost all of Heaney’s poems. In Digging the ‘spade sinks’ into ‘gravelly ground’. In At a Potato Digging the workers form ‘a higgledy line from hedge to headland.’ These are the very sounds of the earth, the flow of water, the suction of mud and the beat of tools and work.

In my (Gillian Clarke) poem, Baby-Sitting hear the ‘s’ in the first line, like breathing: ‘sitting in a strange room listening’. The baby ‘is sleeping a snuffly, roseate, bubbling sleep.These are snuffly sound. ‘Catrin’ s hair is ‘straight strong long’. The Field-Mouse begins, ‘Summer, and the long grass is a snare drum’, and ends with three lines full of ‘b’ sounds, a few ‘t’s, and again that sighing ‘s’:

‘their bones brittle as mouse ribs, the air
stammering with gunfire, my neighbour turned
stranger, wounding my land with stones.’

Note the first two lines of Carol Ann Duffy’s poem, Havisham: ‘sweetheart bastard’, and ‘wished him dead’ It’s a shock to see such words as ‘sweetheart’ and ‘bastard’ side by side. One is tender, the other is angry. It’s the ‘s’ and ‘t’ sounds that connect those words, and ‘w’ and ‘d’ in ‘wished him dead’ underline the anger. Note ‘midnight’, ‘magnificent’, ‘mute’, ‘mate’, ‘mind’, in the first three lines of Stealing.

In Simon Armitage’s Homecoming, listen for ‘c’ sounds in verse two:

‘The second, one canary-yellow cotton jacket
on a cloakroom floor, uncoupled from its hook,
becoming scuffed and blackened underfoot’.

The words are commonplace, but the rhythm and sound of the consonants are pleasing.

ASSONANCE
Assonance is a kind of rhyme made of vowel sounds. Poetry makes music from assonance as often as from alliteration. Read any good poem aloud and hear the assonance sing. Listen for echoes, not just at line-endings but anywhere in a poem. Poetry uses ‘w’ and ‘y’ for assonance as well as the long, short and combined sounds made by the 5 vowels: A,E,I,O,U.

‘O, wild west wind, thou breath of autumn’s being’ wrote the poet Shelley nearly two hundred years ago. You can hear the west wind in the first five words.

There are words made of nothing but vowel sounds, words like where, why, away, oh, woe, you, I, we. Actually, with a bit of punctuation and some dramatic expression you could make a poem out of just those words!

Seamus Heaney has a wonderful way with assonance. Listen to Perch, and read it aloud for ‘alder-dapple’, ‘grunts...flood-slubs, runty’, then ‘guzzling the current...muscle and slur’, and in the last lines, ‘hold’, ‘flows’, and ‘go’. Search Blackberry-Picking for ‘summer’s blood’ followed by ‘tongue’, ‘lust’, ‘hunger’.

In my (Gillian Clarke) poem Catrin, listen for ‘there’, ‘hair’, ‘glare’, and ‘old rope’. In Baby-Sitting watch for ‘snuffly’ and ‘bubbling’, ‘cold’ and ‘lonely’. In Mali, ‘so slowly home’, ‘sweet’ and ‘easy’, ‘towed’ and ‘moon’. In A Difficult Birth, ‘peace deal’ and ‘serious’, ‘broke’, ‘ago’, then ‘her own lost salty ocean’. Finally, ‘opened’ is echoed by ‘stone’.

In Carol Ann Duffy’s poem, We Remember Your Childhood Well, the assonance works as an occasional internal rhyme. That is, rhyme that is inside the lines, not at the ends of the lines. Listen for ‘moors’, ‘saw’, ‘door’. In Education for Leisure, note the way ‘ignored’, ‘ordinary’, ‘boredom’, and even ‘God’ echo, and therefore connect with each other.

In the poem beginning ‘Those bastards in their mansions’, Simon Armitage plays with ‘lawns’, ‘door’, ‘porches’, ‘torches’, the last two words fully rhyming. These are all words which draw attention to each other, because as we hear them we instinctively connect them. The sound affects the meaning of the poem.

ENJAMBMENT
This is the word for one of poetry’s dance steps. It’s the nanosecond pause at the end of one line and the start of another, or the two nanoseconds between verses, where the meaning overruns the line, leaps the gap and lands at the start of the next line, or the next verse. The sentence pauses, and continues, like the toe-to-heel step of a dancer who reaches the edge of the space, and turns without stopping the dance. It’s the nose of the goldfish nudging the glass on its journey round the tank.

Prose is made of sentences, poetry is made of lines. Poetry uses sentences too, but in a poem the lines are in charge, and they decide the way we read it. The pattern a poem makes on the page is musical notation, or choreography. Enjambment stops the sentence in its stride, forcing it to dance to poetry’s tune. Most examples below are of sentence-breaks at verse-endings.

In Seamus Heaney’s At a Potato Digging, between verses 2, 3 and 4, the meaning overruns the verse-endings. Meaning leaps the gap. The gap divides ‘stand’ from ‘tall’, and ‘turf’ from ‘recurs’. Why? The poet has more to say, but wants to keep to his rhyme scheme: ‘stand’ rhymes with ‘headland’, ‘turf’ rhymes with ‘surf’. The enjambment holds the poem together, lets it flow, stops it from jerking to a stop at the line-endings, and varies the rhythm.

In my (Gillian Clarke) poem, A Difficult Birth, the link between lines 21 and 22 is important. Line 21 ends with ‘and you find us’, which lays stress on ‘us’, and line 22 begins with the word ‘peaceful’, which stresses that word. Without enjambment the meaning would be quite different. It would just say ‘you find us peaceful’. The lines need that pause so that ‘us’ and ‘peaceful’ can be heard separately.

Carol Ann Duffy is doing something similar in Haversham. Verse two ends with ‘who did this’ and verse three begins with ‘to me?’ Verse three ends with ‘Love’s’, then verse four begins with ‘hate behind a white veil.’ Waiting that nanosecond for the second part of the sentence helps us weigh the word for a moment before being shocked by the next five words.

Simon Armitage’s Hitcher gives us good examples of enjambment at verse endings. The last three verses are linked in this way. Verse three ends with ‘I dropped it into third’, verse four begins, ‘and leant across’; verse four ends ‘he’d said he liked the breeze’, and verse five begins, ‘to run its fingers/ through his hair.’ The breaking of those words from each other is like someone trying to gasp out a desperate story, and mimics, I think, the stop-go of the journey, the violence of the story.

IAMBIC PENTAMETER
Look up ‘metre’ in a book of poetry terms, and you’ll find too much to take in, so I’ve chosen the important one, Shakespeare’s favourite, and the one you’ll often hear in every day speech. Once you get the hang of it, you’ll hear iambic pentameter everywhere. In the weather forecast: ‘A deep depression moving from the west’. In the street: ‘Diana dyes her hair I’m sure she does.’ In the ordinary things people say: ‘Would anybody like a cup of tea?’ Those examples echo the tune Shakespeare used in his plays and in his sonnets.

The word ‘iambic’ describes a line where the stressed beat falls on the second of two syllables. (When the stress falls on the first syllable, as in ‘Double, double, toil and trouble’, it’s called ‘trochaic’ metre.) Pentameter means five beats in a line. Tap the line with your foot, and you’ll find five good thumps in the rhythm of each line. Of course, poets can do what they like, and even Shakespeare varied it whenever he fancied.

In my (Gillian Clarke) poem On the Train, you’ll find examples of five-beat lines. The first two verses are written in this way, five beats to a line, chosen instinctively, setting the scene that leads to the tragic moment of the train crash. Verse three, when the automatic Vodafone voice speaks, the rhythm breaks into short, stuttering lines, then picks up again for the last three lines. In verse four, the iambic pentameter is lost again. It is a solemn rhythm and it suits the story. The story, and the rhythm, give way to grief. Maybe this suggests that I begin as the storyteller, and gradually imagine I am the traveller involved in the event, or a grieving partner at home. The break in rhythm suggests a struggle to speak and breathe.

Seamus Heaney also lets this rhythm come and go in his poems. You can hear it surface in five of the eight Anthology poems. In Storm on the Island it is maintained in every line. (You may stress the line slightly differently, but you should still come up with five stressed beats): ‘We are prepared: we build our houses squat’. You can hear it in lines from Death of a Naturalist: ‘All year the flax-dam festered in the heart’, and line 4: ‘Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.’ In those lines the familiar beat also draws attention to words which connect with assonant and alliterative sounds, words like: ‘festered’ and ‘sweltered’, and ‘punishing sun’.

Carol Ann Duffy uses very little iambic pentameter in her Anthology selection, choosing other rhythms, a different heartbeat. The poem Anne Hathaway is the one exception, and she chooses the rhythm here for a good reason. The poem is a typical Shakespearean sonnet, spoken as if in the voice of Shakespeare’s widow. All the way through you should be able to hear the five beats in every line. Read it aloud to find where to put the stressed beats.

Simon Armitage is listening to other rhythms in his eight poems included in the Anthology. Compare the rhythms used in his poems with those illustrated above.

LINEATION
Lines. Why do poets use them? What are they for? How do you decide where a line-break goes? Does it make a difference? Is poetry chopped up prose? Poetry is NOT chopped up prose. Poems need lines because poems are songs, but that’s not the whole story - all songs have different tunes. Some poems rhyme, some don’t. Line-lengths can vary. Some poems use lines with a regular beat. Some poems have a delicate rhythm, like breathing, or natural speech.

A line makes you pause at the end, then your eyes flick to the beginning of the next one. The pause lasts a split second, shorter even than a comma, too short to breathe. We take in the line’s last word before reading the first on the next line. The pause lays stress on the last and the first words. That doesn’t happen in prose.

Seamus Heaney’s poems in the anthology mainly rhyme, and the rhyming word clearly marks the line-ending. However, in Death of a Naturalist , which doesn’t rhyme, ‘festered in the heart’ ends line one, and ‘Of the townland’ begins line two. For a moment we’re left with the idea that the flax-dam is festering in the human heart. But no! The flax-dam festers at ‘the heart/ of the townland’, the centre of the area where the poet lived as a child. The two meanings of the word ‘heart’ add force to the image.

My (Gillian Clarke) poem Catrin takes the story forward line by line, ending each one with an important word before moving on. October splits ‘the slow/ fall of flowers’ from ‘Over the page the pen/ runs faster than wind’, with a verse break between the two. The line itself is split, one half in verse two, and the other half in verse three, the first half looking back, the second half moving on towards the future.

Look at Carol Ann Duffy’s Havisham, and Anne Hathaway, for different ways of ending, and breaking, the lines and the verses. Anne Hathaway is a sonnet, so rhythm and rhyme decide. Havisham has an interesting break between verses three and four, where ‘Love’s// hate behind a white veil’ is one sentence, but those two words are separated by the line-ending and the verse break, like Miss Havisham herself, jilted by her fiance on her wedding day.

In Simon Armitage’s poem about his mother helping him to measure a new house, (first line, ‘Mother, any distance greater than a single span’) the lines come in all shapes and sizes. It rhymes, but not all the way to the end, so rhyme doesn’t make all the decisions. Take verses three and four. Three ends with ‘Kite.’ Four begins with ‘I space-walk’, which is what kites do. The short and long lines are like the distances in the house - the stairs, the loft, the skylight. At the end of the poem the poet’s mother is left downstairs holding one end of the tape, while he, in the loft, looks through the skylight at ‘an endless sky/ to fall or fly’. The line break suggests the holding on and letting go, between mother and son.

METAPHOR
A metaphor happens when one image suggests another without using the word ‘like’. The best metaphor is a mere hint. It suggests the companion image with a single word. Metaphor should trust us, allowing our imagination to see how metaphor works like a flash of touching wires. R.S. Thomas, in a poem about the cruelty of nature, writes of the stoat sipping from ‘the brimming rabbit’. One word, ‘brimming’, turns the rabbit into a vessel full of blood set before the stoat. It’s a wonderful metaphor, shocking and exciting.

Metaphor is used every day in spoken English, so no wonder poets use it without even thinking about it. Time flies. Snowdrops peep. Rain dances. You’re burning with rage. In fact, time has no wings, snowdrops have no eyes, rain has no feet, and you have a feeling inside you, not a fire. The thrilling thing about metaphor is that it fills ordinary language with colour, it haunts the way we talk, illuminates plain fact, and is the interesting part of everyday story telling. In contemporary poetry, it is one of the most commonly used poetry devices.

In his poem At a Potato Digging, Seamus Heaney sees the field as a sea. The diggers return ‘to fish a new load from the crumbled surf.’ The earth is also ‘the black mother’, and ‘a seasonal altar’. In Follower, too, Heaney suggests the field is a sea with words like ‘wake’ for the mark the plough leaves behind. In Mid-Term Break the body of his little brother is ‘wearing a poppy bruise’. Frogs are ‘mud grenades’ in Death of a Naturalist.

I, (Gillian Clarke), think of the hospital in which Catrin was born as ‘the glass tank’, the umbilical cord as the ‘red rope of love’, and later as ‘that old rope’. In On the Train, the burning carriage of the crashed train becomes ‘the blazing bone-ship’, like a funeral ship in which the ancient Celts might place the body of a dead hero before setting the boat on fire and launching it on the sea. In The Field Mouse, the ‘long grass is a snare drum.’

In Carol Ann Duffy’s poem Anne Hathaway, (William Shakespeare’s widow) the couple’s bed was ‘a spinning world’, ‘words were shooting stars’, and the widow still holds her dead husband in the ‘casket’ of her head. In lines 5-9, there is a beautiful extended metaphor where their bed was a page where the lovers ‘rhyme’, Anne Hathaway’s body was ‘now echo, assonance’, and her husband’s touch was ‘a verb dancing in the centre of a noun.’

Simon Armitage writes of ‘the acres of the walls, the prairies of the floors’ in the new house his mother is helping him to measure. In the poem beginning ‘I’ve made out a will’, he has metaphors for the whole human body. Blood is ‘a gallon exactly of bilberry soup’, the brain is a ‘loaf’, the rib-cage ‘a cathedral of bone’, the heart a ‘pendulum’.

ONOMATOPOEIA
On-o-mat-o-poe-ia! One-tom-a-to-pizz-a! I-am-gonna-pay-ya! I love the word, and can’t resist playing with it. It comes from Greek and means ‘word-making’. Onomatopoeia imitates the sound of the thing it describes, and because it uses musical effects it’s perfect for poetry. Children make new words using it: quack-quack; bow-wow; moo cow; brmm-brmm, and nee-naw is an excellent word for a fire engine or police car.

Widely used in primitive language, it’s at the root of many English words, words like wind, owl, cuckoo, sizzle. A snake hisses and slithers, like the sound of its voice and its movement through grass. The most obvious examples are words like ‘pop’, ‘bang’, ‘hush!’ In parts of south-west Britain plimsolls, or pumps, are known as daps, which is the sound they make as you run. ‘Get your daps on!’ means ‘Hurry!’ A poet’s use of onomatopoeia is occasional, even rare. It is not easy to find examples in the GCSE anthology. It would be easier to find examples in comics!

I (Gillian Clarke) have found a few examples in my poem The Field-Mouse, where the sound of a word expresses its meaning. Examples are words like ‘hums’, ‘drum’, and the ‘stammering’ of gunfire.

In Seamus Heaney’s Death of a Naturalist the sounds made by frogs in muddy places are heard in ‘bubbles gargled’, ‘slobber’, ‘croaking’, ‘slap’, ‘pop’.

Carol Ann Duffy, in her poem We Remember Your Childhood Well, uses ‘Boom. Boom. Boom.’ for the sound of voices, and in Stealing, the word-sound ‘Aah’ for breathing on a mirror.

Simon Armitage uses ‘scuffed’ for the marks made by children treading on his yellow jacket in Homecoming, and you can hear the scuff-scuffle of feet in the word.

RHYME
Some poets in the late twentieth century seemed to think rhyme was a crime. Of course, rhyme can be a trap. It can sound glib. Classical Greek poets didn’t use it. Early British (Welsh) and Old English poets relied on assonance and alliteration. Rhyme is heard at line endings, and the effect is in the echo of twin sounds. Because English spelling is crazy, there’s extra fun to be had in the ill matched appearance of rhyming words like ‘after’ and ‘laughter’, and ‘daughter’ and ‘water’. Children love rhyme. It’s great for insults, name calling, ring games, talking to babies, spells, jokes, hymns, incantation, and remembering. Rhyme can make us laugh. It can add poignancy to an elegy like W.H. Auden’s ‘Stop All the Clocks’. Shakespeare uses rhyming couplets to end a scene, or a play:

‘For never was a story of more woe
Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.’

Poetry also uses half rhyme, and internal rhyme.

My poem (Gillian Clarke) Cold Knap Lake uses half rhyme, with a rhyming couplet at the end. Stanza one pairs ‘crowd’ with ‘dead’, ‘lake’ with ‘silk’, and so on. The poem tells the true story of a child who almost drowned in a lake close to where we lived when I was five. By the end of the poem the true story has almost become a legend. A fully rhyming couplet seems the right way to end a fairy story.

In Seamus Heaney’s Mid-Term Break saves rhyme for the last two lines, where he closes the poem by a rhyming couplet ending with ‘clear’ and ‘year’, a typical Shakespearean way to end a scene. The first five lines of Digging rhyme, the rest do not. Storm on the Island uses a loose pattern of half-rhyme. Look for the final letter of the last word in each line, the t of ‘squat’ and ‘slate’, then the s of ‘us’ and ‘stacks’, then s, l, s, l, of ‘stacks’, ‘trees’, ‘full’, ‘branches’. Some lines don’t rhyme at all; but again he ends with a half rhyming couplet, with ‘air’ and ‘fear’. Compare that with Perch, written in five fully rhyming couplets.

Carol Ann Duffy is a dazzling rhymer, and she has her own way of using it. Salome illustrates this well. You don’t need to look for end rhymes, or bother with half-rhymes. Read it aloud and just listen! Find ‘later’, ‘matter’, ‘matted’, ‘lighter’, ‘laughter’, ‘flatter’, ‘pewter’, ‘Peter’, and so on. There are 21 words all rhyming with each other. It makes the poem playful, and makes Salome defiant, witty, and makes a gruesome story funny.

Simon Armitage often uses rhyme, in his own way and with great skill. He doesn’t obey the old rules. He loves popular music, and uses rhyme rather as songs do. Kid rhymes all the way through with two-syllable words, all with a stress on the second syllable from last, and all of them ending in ‘er’. Look at and listen to, ‘order’, ‘wander’, ‘yonder’, and so on. The poem beginning, ‘Mother, any distance greater than a single span’ opens with rhyming pairs, then breaks the pattern, but at the end you feel you’ve heard a rhyming poem. That’s because there are internal rhymes too, and the final rhyming lines, ‘sky’ and ‘fly’, confirm it.

RHYTHM
Walk, run, use a hammer, a pen, a shovel, a pair of oars, a garden fork. Heartbeat, breathing, being alive. That’s where rhythm comes from. The language that poets use takes its rhythm from the way we live and move. Poets today are also influenced by three main English language sources. Here is a brief summary of these main influences on poetry, as well as the way we speak and write.

1. The BALLAD, or working song is the oldest. Ballads usually rhyme. Often they use a stressed 4/3 beat, with 4 thumps in the first line, 3 in the second, like this:

‘I married a man from County Roscommon
And I live at the back of beyond
With a field of cows and a yard of hens
And six white geese on the pond.’

(‘Overheard in County Sligo’. GC)

2. SHAKESPEARE didn’t invent the 5 beats of iambic pentameter that he used in his poems and plays: ‘It was the nightingale and not the lark’. (Romeo and Juliet). It was probably the way people spoke. No doubt Shakespeare heard it and spoke it. Even today we still often use this speech rhythm: ‘Come on, a cup of tea will do you good.’ ‘Get out of bed and do a bit of work!’ (See the page on Iambic Pentameter for more on this.)

3. NATURAL SPEECH. Then came the way we think and speak now. The rhythms of our speech today are as natural to us as breathing and are the drums that beat in the poetry of today. These, and something unique in each one of us, create that special thing, the poet’s voice.

Seamus Heaney‘s rhythms come from all the above original sources. 4 of the 8 poems follow the iambics of Shakespeare that we all still use, whether we know it or not. To this he adds accents and words common in the North of Ireland. You could say he hears two drums beating, the drums of educated, literary English, and of Catholic Ireland. A ‘townland’ is a rural place of a few houses, too scattered to be a village. The rhythm uses one-syllable words like ‘grunts’, ’slub’, ‘sod’, ‘pluck’, mixed with Latin words like ‘libation’, from his Catholic background. .In Mid-Term Break neighbours say they are ‘sorry for your trouble’, the Irish way to express condolences to the bereaved. In Digging he says:

‘My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.’

which sound like lines from a ballad. Once you’ve heard him read, you never read his poetry any other way.

My poem (Gillian Clarke) On the Train uses, more or less, iambic pentameter until the moment when the automatic Vodafone voice speaks, the trains have crashed at Paddington, and everything breaks down. Iambic pentameter is a dignified rhythm, and expresses the tragedy. As the poem moves from setting the scene to the catastrophe, the rhythm breaks. The poem gradually enter the mind of a traveller involved in the event, or a grieving person waiting at home. The broken rhythms suggest chaos. The rhythm of Cold Knap Lake also expresses a transition from the story I remembered as a five-year old witness, to the rhythm of a myth or nursery rhyme in the final two lines.

Carol Ann Duffy‘s rhythms always suit the subject. Each one is different. Elvis’s Twin Sister uses the short lines of an Elvis song, quoting the songs and mixing them with words and phrases of a convent. Anne Hathaway is written in iambic pentameter. Salome cleverly slips in asides, extra remarks like ‘sooner or later’, and ‘what did it matter’, between the rhythm of iambic pentameter in the first few lines. This rhythm comes and goes throughout the poem. Before You Were Mine is an example of the special Carol Ann Duffy style. It’s a speaking voice, but it’s as rhythmic to read aloud as the ballrooms, the dance bands, the cha cha of her mother’s youth. We Remember Your Childhood Well and Education for Leisure are both told through another voice, not the poet’s own. Both take their rhythm from natural speech, the way we speak now, the way we tell a story.

Simon Armitage loves popular music, and knows a lot about it. His poetry reflects this. The tune and language of his native Yorkshire is strong in every poem, and his 8 poems in the anthology have fewer lines of iambic pentameter than the other poets mentioned here. In ‘Mother, any distance greater than a single span/ requires a second pair of hands’, the rhyme may be traditional, but the short and long lines sing to his own tune. His use of the things people say, ‘requires a second pair of hands’, for example, and the whole first verse of the next poem, contribute to this natural sound, this conversational beat.

My father thought it bloody queer,
the day I rolled home with a ring of silver in my ear
half hidden by a mop of hair. ‘You’ve lost your head.
If that’s how easily you’re led
you should’ve had it through your nose instead.’

It’s not only the quoted voice of his father, but the whole poem that uses phrases and therefore rhythms that come from real people speaking. All Simon Armitage’s poems do that.

SIMILE
Similes and metaphors are doing the same thing. They make a link in the reader’s mind between two images. A metaphor uses one image to suggest another without using the word ‘like’. It is a subtle hint, and it leaves the reader’s imagination to complete the connection. In ‘Catrin’ I turn the umbilical cord into ‘that old rope’. Grace Nichols talks of ‘The howling ship of the wind’. (‘Hurricane hits England’)

A simile is more direct. ‘Like’ can prevent a confusion of meaning. Grace Nicols, in the same poem, the same verse, says the wind is ‘Like some dark ancestral spectre’.

Seamus Heaney describes how the sea spray ‘spits like a tame cat/ turned savage.’ Indeed, there are similes in six out the eight set AQA Anthology poems by Seamus Heaney. In At a Potato Digging the people are ‘like crows’. In Follower his father’s shoulders are ‘like a full sail strung’. The sea, in Storm on the Island is ‘like a tame cat’. The fruit are like ‘a plate of eyes’ in Blackberry-Picking. The frogs are ‘like mud grenades’ in Death of a Naturalist. In At a Potato Digging the potatoes are ‘like inflated pebbles’, and ‘Hope rotted like a marrow’. The student should look at these similes and decide what effect they have on the poem and on what they make the reader see and understand about the poem.

There is one simile in my poems, (Gillian Clarke) but beware! In Mali, ‘I bake her a cake like our house’ is NOT a simile. It is a description of the cake, shaped and decorated to look like our house. It is a literal fact. I can find plenty of metaphors in almost every one of my poems, but in the AQA anthology selection I can find only one simile. It’s in the second line from the end of ‘October’: ‘I must write like the wind’. With that simile I picked up, quite instinctively, from a metaphor in the first two lines of that verse:

‘Over the page the pen
runs faster than wind’s white steps over grass.’

Carol Ann Duffy has one simile in her eight poems. Salome’s lover was ‘like a lamb to the slaughter’.

The nearest thing Simon Armitage comes to a simile in his 8 poems is when his character in Kid says ‘he was like a father to me.’ This is not a simile. It is a description of the person’s behaviour as being like a father’s behaviour. That does not make the strange connection that simile usually makes.

SONNET
Form is sound. Sound is form. The pattern on the page is the tune in your ear. A sonnet looks and sounds like a sonnet. This is because words are not silent. They speak aloud in your mind. The human ear and heart enjoy rhythm and rhyme as much as the human eye enjoys pattern. A sonnet is a poem of 14 lines written, usually, in iambic pentameter, that is, each line contained five strong beats, as in most of Shakespeare’s verse. See line 2 in the Shakespeare quotation below, how the five words ‘then’, ‘scorn’, ‘change’, ‘state’ and ‘kings’ carry five stressed beats.

(see also article on iambic pentameter)

A sonnet’s line endings rhyme in various ways. Using the alphabet as a code for the rhymes, look at the two main sonnet sound patterns: they are known as the Italian sonnet, which rhymes a,b,b,a/ a,b,b,a/ c,d,e,c,d,e, and the most common Shakespearean sonnet, a,b,b,a/ c,d,c,d/ e,f,e,f/ g,g. The Italian sonnet (also called the Petrarchan sonnet after the poet Petrarch) has 8 lines, then 6 lines. Often there’s a pause between the two parts, and often the thought shifts at that point.

The Shakespearean sonnet is usually printed in a block, without verses. Shakespeare’s sonnets are often love poems, and his concluding couplets are mood music for lovers:

‘For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.’

All four poets in the AQA Anthology sometimes write sonnets, but only one, Anne Hathaway by Carol Ann Duffy, is included in the selection. In the other section of the anthology, on page 50, there is a beautiful sonnet by William Shakespeare, a love poem known as Sonnet 130. It is a good idea to compare the two poems. Shakespeare follows the rules absolutely. His rhyme pattern, represented by the alphabet, is a, b, a, b, c, d, c, d, e, f, e, f, g, g. It ends, as Shakespeare’s always do, with a rhyming couplet. Carol Ann Duffy breaks the rules. Her sonnet ends with a rhyming couplet too, but in the 8 central lines she chooses the best word rather than force the rhyme into a pattern. She begins with a, b, a, b, and then allows the words at line-endings to echo a word somewhere in the poem, but she does not force it. She ends with a rhyming couplet.

Nevertheless the poem SOUNDS as if it rhymes. After reading it you think you’ve read a rhyming poem. Why is this? It is partly because she keeps to the iambic pentameter, Shakespeare’s favourite rhythm, and partly because the poem REFERS to Shakespeare. The subject is Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare’s wife, to whom he left his ‘second best bed’ in his will. It is a love poem, as most of Shakespeare’s sonnets were. Many of the metaphors in Carol Ann Duffy’s poem make connections with language, words like rhyme, assonance, verb, noun, written, page, romance, drama, all used as metaphors for the relationship between the lovers.