Good day wherever you are, and welcome to our fourth session!
So far in the course, we have worked on…
-Folk tales : “Rapunzel”, The Grimm Brothers.
-Horror stories : “The Cask of Amontillado”, Edgar Allan Poe.
-Humor : “A Story Without an End”, Mark Twain.
And today… poetry has the spotlight! We’ll read the works of Emily Dickinson.
WHAT IS POETRY?
Poetry is a special type of writing in which words are chosen and arranged in lines to create certain effects.
Poetry is meant to be read aloud, since poets carefully select words for their sounds and connotations, and combine them in different and unusual ways. They communicate feelings, experiences, and points of view.
Some poems follow strict rules for form, rythm and rhyme, while others follow no rules and are known as “free verse”.
Like fiction, poems can also tell stories.
Figurative Language
Have you ever looked at a cloud and imagined different shapes in it?
That is what a writer does when using figurative language: to communicate ideas beyond the literal meaning of the words.
The purpose of using figurative language is to describe things in ways that cause the readers to experience particular feelings.
Consider these sentences:
- Literal : That woman is mean and I don’t trust her.
- Figurative : That woman is a snake.
The literal statement is true, but it is also dull. The words do not arouse emotions in the reader.
The figurative statement is not literally true. However, it is more imaginative and creates emotions and ideas.
There are many kinds of figurative language to increase emotional impact. That is what characterizes a writer perhaps.
Three of the most common are :
-
simile : a comparison of two different things, using like or as.
example – The morning was bright and yellow as a sunflower. -
metaphor : a direct comparison of two different things that have something in common.
example – The morning was an open sunflower. -
personification : the attribution of human qualities to an object, animal or idea.
example – The morning gave me a bright sunflower.