/lit/ - Literature

it was weird when i learned english poetry need the final termination to be identical for it to rhyme
strange really.

Bro I am a retard who doesn't understand poetry.

>>18607838
the long s always makes it sound like the author has a lifp in my head

>>18607856
Read poems out loud. It sounds autistic, but speaking them makes you understand the cadences and flows better than if you are just scanning them using the prose reading method, which doesn't apply to poetry.

>>18607838
Why not have & eat the cake, 1400 page doorstopper poems

>>18607901
>try this
>stumble over every unknown metre
>DAH duh DAH duh DAH duh duh any known metre
I am simply too autistic for poetry.

>>18607849
>english poetry need the final termination to be identical for it to rhyme
Uhhh how does rhyming work in other languages?

>>18607901
Even translated poetry?

>>18607849
How does rhyming work in your language? Are you saying that the English words "road" and "hole" would rhyme because the final vowel sound is the same?

>>18607838
>Why does this board care so much about prose when poetry is clearly and objectively the superior artform?

For me poetry and prose can be the same thing. I think one of the greatest definitions of poetry was made by Emily Dickinson:

>“If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?”

This means that works considered great poetry, such as the following poem (and so many other famous and celebrated poems):

The Emperor of Ice-Cream
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Or:

When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my Soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide,
“Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”
I fondly ask. But patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is Kingly: thousands at his bidding speed,
And post o’er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait.

Are not poetry.

But this here, which I find in Moby Dick, is certainly poetry:

It's a small description of the sea:

>"When beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean's skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang."

Or:

>Now, had Tashtego perished in that head, it had been a very precious perishing; smothered in the very whitest and daintiest of fragrant spermaceti; coffined, hearsed, and tombed in the secret inner chamber and sanctum sanctorum of the whale. Only one sweeter end can readily be recalled—the delicious death of an Ohio honey-hunter, who seeking honey in the crotch of a hollow tree, found such exceeding store of it, that leaning too far over, it sucked him in, so that he died embalmed. How many, think ye, have likewise fallen into Plato’s honey head, and sweetly perished there?

>>18607907
>>18607915

in gaelic, native, rhyme just works with the last vowel
So the words cìr and mìn both rhyme since they end with ì same with the words sunnt and null because they end with u.

> Are you saying that the English words "road" and "hole" would rhyme because the final vowel sound is the same?
they dont rhyme since that isnt the rule in english

>>18607939

Other examples:

Ahab to the cut-off head of a dead whale:

>It was a black and hooded head; and hanging there in the midst of so intense a calm, it seemed the Sphynx’s in the desert. “Speak, thou vast and venerable head,” muttered Ahab, “which, though ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world’s foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou hast been where bell or diver never went; hast slept by many a sailor’s side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down. Thou saw’st the locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them. Thou saw’st the murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper midnight of the insatiate maw; and his murderers still sailed on unharmed— while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that would have borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms. O head! thou hast seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!”

>>18607947
*sunnd

>>18607954

Or this, the love-nest of the whales, in "The Grand Armada":

But far beneath this wondrous world upon the surface, another and still stranger world met our eyes as we gazed over the side. For, suspended in those watery vaults, floated the forms of the nursing mothers of the whales, and those that by their enormous girth seemed shortly to become mothers. The lake, as I have hinted, was to a considerable depth exceedingly transparent; and as human infants while suckling will calmly and fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if leading two different lives at the time; and while yet drawing mortal nourishment, be still spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence;—even so did the young of these whales seem looking up towards us, but not at us, as if we were but a bit of Gulfweed in their new-born sight. Floating on their sides, the mothers also seemed quietly eyeing us. One of these little infants, that from certain queer tokens seemed hardly a day old, might have measured some fourteen feet in length, and some six feet in girth. He was a little frisky; though as yet his body seemed scarce yet recovered from that irksome position it had so lately occupied in the maternal reticule; where, tail to head, and all ready for the final spring, the unborn whale lies bent like a Tartar’s bow. The delicate side-fins, and the palms of his flukes, still freshly retained the plaited crumpled appearance of a baby’s ears newly arrived from foreign parts.

“Line! line!” cried Queequeg, looking over the gunwale; “him fast! him fast!—Who line him! Who struck?—Two whale; one big, one little!”

“What ails ye, man?” cried Starbuck.

“Look-e here,” said Queequeg, pointing down.

As when the stricken whale, that from the tub has reeled out hundreds of fathoms of rope; as, after deep sounding, he floats up again, and shows the slackened curling line buoyantly rising and spiralling towards the air; so now, Starbuck saw long coils of the umbilical cord of Madame Leviathan, by which the young cub seemed still tethered to its dam. Not seldom in the rapid vicissitudes of the chase, this natural line, with the maternal end loose, becomes entangled with the hempen one, so that the cub is thereby trapped. Some of the subtlest secrets of the seas seemed divulged to us in this enchanted pond. We saw young Leviathan amours in the deep. [2]

And thus, though surrounded by circle upon circle of consternations and affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at the centre freely and fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concernments; yea, serenely revelled in dalliance and delight. But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.

>>18607907
>>18607915
not that guy, but there are many different types of rhyming in english, assonance for the vowels, consonance for consonants, alliteration, masculine (the one you usually think of), feminine, near rhyme, etc.

>>18607961

Or:

>It was a queer sort of place—a gable-ended old house, one side palsied as it were, and leaning over sadly. It stood on a sharp bleak corner, where that tempestuous wind Euroclydon kept up a worse howling than ever it did about poor Paul's tossed craft. Euroclydon, nevertheless, is a mighty pleasant zephyr to any one in-doors, with his feet on the hob quietly toasting for bed. "In judging of that tempestuous wind called Euroclydon," says an old writer—of whose works I possess the only copy extant—"it maketh a marvellous difference, whether thou lookest out at it from a glass window where the frost is all on the outside, or whether thou observest it from that sashless window, where the frost is on both sides, and of which the wight Death is the only glazier." True enough, thought I, as this passage occurred to my mind—old black-letter, thou reasonest well. Yes, these eyes are windows, and this body of mine is the house. What a pity they didn't stop up the chinks and the crannies though, and thrust in a little lint here and there. But it's too late to make any improvements now. The universe is finished; the copestone is on, and the chips were carted off a million years ago. Poor Lazarus there, chattering his teeth against the curbstone for his pillow, and shaking off his tatters with his shiverings, he might plug up both ears with rags, and put a corn-cob into his mouth, and yet that would not keep out the tempestuous Euroclydon. Euroclydon! says old Dives, in his red silken wrapper—(he had a redder one afterwards) pooh, pooh! What a fine frosty night; how Orion glitters; what northern lights! Let them talk of their oriental summer climes of everlasting conservatories; give me the privilege of making my own summer with my own coals.

>But what thinks Lazarus? Can he warm his blue hands by holding them up to the grand northern lights? Would not Lazarus rather be in Sumatra than here? Would he not far rather lay him down lengthwise along the line of the equator; yea, ye gods! go down to the fiery pit itself, in order to keep out this frost?

>Now, that Lazarus should lie stranded there on the curbstone before the door of Dives, this is more wonderful than that an iceberg should be moored to one of the Moluccas. Yet Dives himself, he too lives like a Czar in an ice palace made of frozen sighs, and being a president of a temperance society, he only drinks the tepid tears of orphans.

>>18607939
>Tashtego
Is this a vore fetish?

>>18607939
Prose can be poetry I agree, but unfortunately only about 1% of writers utilize the potentials of prose to have poetic qualities. Proust, Woolf, Sebald, they got it, but not many other people got the memo.

>>18608008
>Sebald

I didn’t knew his prose was poetic. Could you quote some good excerpts?

>>18608061
His books are basically 300 page prose poems. Super comfy.
He has a 9 page sentence in Austerlitz.

saying poetry is inherently better than prose is comparing oranges and apples, they're just different.

I could argue that poetry is inherently worse than prose because without the restrictions of fitting rhythm and rhyme an author can write more creatively.
I won't make that argument, but I could.

>>18608341
>I could argue that poetry is inherently worse than prose because without the restrictions of fitting rhythm and rhyme an author can write more creatively.
But rhythm and rhyme often help us creatively. It works like a divination system of sorts.
You stare at the blank page and it's like:
-What do I see?
-What are my possibilities?

>>18608341
prose has its own limitations

>>18608487
Yeah I can see how fitting a rhythm/rhyme scheme could work to create more interesting content, the limitations breed creativity.
>>18608529
which are?


also to both of you, I just thought this up but I think it's worthwhile; a poet can't break into prose but a writer can break into poetry. ie. a poetic work is expected to not use prose, or at least make very little use of it, while a prose work can use poetry whenever it pleases and people don't really bat an eye. Tolkien comes to mind as an example of the latter.

again though I don't think either is actually inherently better, I think they're different mediums with their own benefits

>>18607838
poetry can be prose too, midwit

>>18607947
Nah what you're talking about is an "end rhyme" there are plenty of different types of rhymes in English but colloquially: rhyme = end rhyme.

>>18610191
>>18607963
Actually, this anon is correct a colloquial rhyme is a masculine rhyme, but what you mean by "final termination" is an end rhyme

>>18607838

Great non-fiction edges great poetry, but only slightly in terms of its importance to the human condition. Prose fiction is the midwit valley territory. Pic related is a rough schema of these truths.