Assorted Flavours

Unless you're a metal fan, replace ov with of, ov wasn't really common usage, if you're trying to make it sound Middle English through grammar and spelling, you'd be better off checking the spelling of each individual word. Nevertheless it's a pretty good poem.

I wasn't sure about the ov thing either. I know it's used a lot in metal lyrics and I always assumed it was just the middle english way of spelling it.
This is since a lot of the songs were about medieval events.

The drawing's better than I could ever do. I quite like it actually.

The poem, though... well, I doubt I could've done that that well at - what, fourteen? Fifteen? ... but now, knowing a little more about it, I'd say you definitely need to put a heck of a lot more work into your metre.

I'd suggest reading Stephen Fry's book on writing poetry, The Ode Less Travelled - I learnt a lot from that. Basically, a line of a poem is constructed from 'poetic feet' which measure stress - an iamb, for example, of which you may have heard, goes "da-DUM". Thus a line "iambic pentameter", which Shakespeare was very fond of, is made of five iambs - "da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM".

There are loads of different types of feet, like the trochee (DUM-da) and the anapest (da-da-DUM), and the different ways of fitting them together alter the tone of the verse. For something comical, for example, "anapestic tetrameter" might do very well (da-da-DUM da-da-DUM da-da-DUM da-da-DUM) - this was a favourite of Doctor Seuss ("My tricks are not bad,” said the Cat in the Hat"; you will notice that the first foot is often an iamb rather than an anapest, but that's okay); A Visit from Saint Nicholas is another good example ("'Twas the night before Christmas and all thru' the house").

The most important thing, though, is to pick a style for your lines - whether it's amphibrachic dimeter or trochaic hexameter or, hell, spondaic heptameter - and stick to it. It really helps.

Unless you're writing blank verse, but not much middle English poetry is blank verse...

Free verse? Blank verse is when it's strictly metred but doesn't rhyme.

Oh God I don't know, been a year since I've done poetry. I'll go and Google it.

Poetry is a really dumb form of art.

Psychology is a really dumb form of pseudo-science.

You're all dumb forms of dumb.

0/10

Would not recommend to others

I mean seriously

Considering my tastes, you could have done a lot better than that.

poetry is pretty gay, but i like it when it's put to music. music that doesn't suck anus.

I like singing and theater rhyming because they are dependent on an instrument/actor.

Reading lyrics or a script by themselves sucks balls.

I find it difficult to grasp how you could say that an entire art form is worthless. You know, loving anime the way you do.

I don't think it's worthless, I just think it's annoyingly complex and restrictive for something that's generally and historically claimed to be the purest form of artistic expression.

I mean, don't get me wrong. There are poems I like, I just find myself unable to appreciate the poems that everyone claims to be the cream of the crop. I've studied poetry in both high school and university and I've even bought some books of poetry in the last few years in an attempt to, really really excuse the term, better myself. I just really don't get it. I woudln't really call myself a fan of experimental prose or arthouse films, but at least I get them and can appreciate them. It's just poetry man.

Also I was very very tired when I posted in this blog. I don't hate poetry and I said one thing that was an outright lie (I've red Racine's Phaedre from cover to cover about twenty times and I adore it)

So yeah

So are you suggesting cream of the crop poets like Siegfried Sassoon, who convey turmoil, death and war are inappreciable?

You can't give such a broad statement like that and not back it up with evidence.

No, I say that I find myself unable to appreciate them.

And if we're talking war poets, then Sassoon is okay but I much prefer Owen.

You got to admit though, WoF, that some poems really are the metaphorical bomb artistically speaking. I can understand not appreciating people like Siegfried Sassoon but when it comes to poetic geniuses like Norman Douglas, I think everybody's in agreement that he's a truly remarkable artist.

While Googling for the exact words of this I discovered that I've apparently posted it here in a blog comment before. I hope people won't think this means I like it.

Before I read that quote I thought you were being serious, nearly burst a blood vessel in my eye.

And that's fair enough, WoF, to each their own. I was just surprised to a degree, I thought most people enjoyed poetry.

Poetry is pretty boring to me. Just not my thing

I also find it mostly boring. Especially if I wrote it. Then it's boring and embarrassing.

I enjoy reading some poetry sometimes.

I do not enjoy analysing literary techniques in poetry or writing essays about it.

I didn't actually read the op.

poetry is difficult for me. i either love it or hate it. my favourite is The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. it's fucking huge, though.

in fact, if i've got this right, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was what made the saying "water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink" famous. it was first used in the poem to demonstrate how tortured the main character was that he was stranded on a ship with a dead crew, dying of thirst, but never actually dying.

also it was the first to mention "albatross around the neck" which is pretty much what the whole poem stems from, meaning to do something wrong and carry it's burden forever.

here's a statue of the Ancient Mariner in Somerset:



so yeah. i like that poem.

Very rarely do i find myself able to enjoy poetry. Mostly it's just people trying to be deep, thinking they are deep but actually aren't and just use a bunch of synonyms for other words or blatant metaphors... I do find certain music lyrics to be beautiful though. Some people just have a gift with words and can make you ponder a text for hours.