before I start talking about subg genres and forms in poetry I want to take just a moment to talk about form and content so as I'm sure you remember when we talked about pros and we talked about fiction we said that each of these categories is a genre in and of itself but there are also subgenres here um where that particular larger genre can be divided into smaller parts now in the case of poetry um in order to determine what kind of poem it is there are two things we need to keep in mind uh form and content and the two can be related and work in conjunction with with each other but they can also work against each other so let's begin with the easier one first content is the um subject of the poem what it's basically about put in our language uh it's the topic so a lot of times the subgenre of poetry is defined by the topic for example if it's um a tribute to somebody who has died that particular topic it's an elegy if it is a conventional Love lyric um given to a person that you admire it's a sonnet so content can sometimes Define the subgenre of poetry however there's also um a tricky Little Thing Called form which has a lot of meaning up until about 1880 so from the earliest English poetry to about 1880 and somewhere between 1880 and World War I form which is let's call it uh regularity in meter uh and in um Ryme so it's iomic pentameter or Amic trimeter or there different forms of meter and also its rhyme scheme will sort of also tell us a little bit about what the um what kind of subgenre it is in a lot of cases the two of them as I say work um in harmony together so if you see um something in a sonnet form which is 14 lines of poetry with a very particular end rhyme scheme we know that that is a sonnet and not surprisingly its content would be uh about um a love situation where you have a Suitor wooing somebody that he or she wants to make as part of their lives occasionally form and content can work against each other in other words you could have a sonnet not written about lovers but the form could be a Sonet but the content could be about war and death so now you've got a kind of dissonance between form and content and there are lots of um examples of this particularly in C I'm thinking of Apocalypse Now I don't know if you know that movie but the American Military is in Vietnam and they they um the helicopters come in first thing in the morning with Napal and they're basically flamethrowers that torch um everything on the ground and just burn it to a crisp and while these helicopters are flying in and and scorching everything uh on the earth underneath them you have this beautiful symphonic musical score playing that is calm and tranquil and so you have a dissonance between the soundtrack in what you see and so you can have the same thing in form and content in poetry so sometimes they work together in harmony and sometimes they work against each other so keeping that in mind let's go through some of these different uh subg genres so the first kind of poem and these are in no particular order uh is something called a long narrative and a narrative basically means it is a story so it is kind of like fiction and a short story in the novel it has characterization it has plot which as you recall we said is about conflict in the sequence of events it has setting um and in this particular long narrative swin in the green night it's a poem about King Arthur's Court at Christmas time when uh a large 18 foot green man rides a horse into Arthur's Court and challenges Arthur to a duel to the death to defend Arthur's honor because Arthur is a king he cannot fight for himself and he has to find a champion and there's a whole sort of story that follows along about this so a long narrative doesn't have to have a particular form um often it can be uh 10 syllables per line um so uh you know it's a cabic but it doesn't have to be it can be anything actually and in this case the sub genre is M Mo mostly defined by its um its uh content rather than its form um if you look down here there is something about um the form of serga however that is interesting I should mention this it isn't what defines a long narrative poem but it is particular to um uh to this par this uh this ballad called um a bob and wheel in sirga and um this is Middle English um this King that lay at Camelot upon um Christmas that's Christ mass or Christmas uh with Mony L lord leadth of the best so it's you've got these lines here uh and and so this is um this is the main part 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 10 15 here 16 17 18 19 and then you have the shorter lines do you see here starting around line 20 there's four lines and they're no longer 10 syllables long um they're down to five syllables or half the length so this is a particular form in Ser gwin but not required to make it a narrative poem so in this instance even though it's a long ballad what defining its sub genre is not the form but the content if you have poems arranged in stanzas that is to say groups of lines it can be 2 three four five 6 8 10 it doesn't matter but stanzas where you have um uh lines that are separated by paragraphs um so they look visually distinctive that's called uh stiic which means that it's arranged in trunks or um chunks or in paragraphs um here's another sub genre that really doesn't have a particular form to it it's called a ballad and it has got a regular meter okay now one of the things I was saying about what happens to poetry after 1880 and somewhere between 1880 and World War I is that form as we know it 10 syllables per line regular meter all begins to break down and so as we move into 20th century poetry it becomes harder and harder to conceptualize and Define what form is because the rigorous rules of earlier forms begins to break down but here a ballad is a long um narrative also um but it is intended to be sung which means that it has really got a particular meter to it and it happens um in this case you can see uh these are uh there's a quatrain here which is a four line stanza and then everything else is in twos um and the meter has to be regular if it's a song because the music is regular you can't keep changing the meter because the the melody only goes one particular way so all the words have to fit into that particular um uh metrical pattern the other thing about a ballad is that it's usually a story that is about a hero it can often be dark and dreary about death um about murder about very dark subjects but it's got a story line to it that is sort of like an action thriller and the only real thing you have to worry about in terms of form for The Ballad is as long as it's religiously regular that every it's always 10 syllables per line and always the same and always the same and always the same you can see here the end rhyme of ring and thing and knife and life and S and fair all of that regularity is the form of the ballot and the content as I say is usually about an adventure or uh some sort of dark narrative plotline uh it says here dark dreary and depressing murder death disaster um here's an example of a ballad uh sung by Peter Paul and Mary uh and it's called polyon and the story is about a young man who's out hunting and um uh his fiance happens to be in the same forest and she's wearing a kind of white um feathery cloak or hat and he's hunting and he thinks she is a swan and so he shoots her with his bow and arrow and uh kills her not realizing that um he's made this horrible mistake and that um she wasn't what he thought he was what what he thought she was and um and so he's made this awful mistake and it's a tragedy This Is The Stuff of ballads okay there's another one here that you might know of by Gordon Lightfoot The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald about a ship that's that sunk uh I believe it's on Lake Superior and everyone drowned on it during a storm that kind of um uh dark topic is really the essence of a ballad Johnny Cash is the Long Black Veil it's a story about a man who's murdered his wife reluctantly and now feels horribly repentant and is about to die um so if you see a poem like that that is to say the topic is very dark and uh about crime or brutality and there's any kind of regular meter to it it's a ballad um a lyric is a shorts poem usually about love uh but it could also be about a lighthearted mood or subject um I'm thinking here of Simon and gar Fun's um I think it's called 52 Bridge Street song uh it's just a a little lyrical piece about um feeling chical groovy and and and walking around and enjoying the day a lyric can have any kind of form it's not really restricted the one that is really important for us in this course is the sonnet and there are three different flavors Shakespearean Sydney and Spencer and um the they are always 14 lines and so the form is clearly defined if you see a poem about love and it's 14 lines long uh and it's got a one of the three particular rhyme schemes that come with this I'll talk about that in a different lecture it's going to be a sonnet a lament is primarily defined by its subject or content or topic not by its form at all can take any shape or form a lament is a poem about the loss of something precious not a human life okay that is an elegy um a lament is about in this case a loss of a LIF style um I encourage you to go and listen to Stan Rogers uh Mak and break Harbor it's um it's a poem SL um song lament about the how the grand Banks off the coast of Newland were fished out there were millions and millions of tons of cod there until Western culture came along with these great big trollers with radar that could hunt fish and scoop them up by the ton and they actually fished out the grand Banks so they basically cleaned out that almost infinite supply of uh Cod that was there leaving the people of um Nova Scotia and New Finland and the maritimes out of work because there were no fish left and so make and break Harbor is an example of that there's another lament by Oliver Goldsmith in the deserted village you can read the poem here about a young man who's been away from his little hick town for a few years and he comes back as a mature man uh hoping to um come back to this little village in which he was raised and to be a big shot um to be the man who was worldly and traveled around and knew everything about everything and came back and made an impression with all the local people and he comes back to his little village and he finds that um there's nobody there um except two old um straggly people and that the clean river that used to run through it is all choked with pollution and it's basically a lament for a loss of way of life because the natural environment of that little village has been contaminated by a factory which has polluted everything and destroyed the natural landscape and left everybody to leave and go and look for a new life elsewhere so a lament is a point home that Mourns the loss of something precious but not human usually a lifestyle is what that is an allery is a poem of mourning for the loss of a person who has died so it is a poem specifically dedicated to somebody who has died and it goes back you know to the 12th and 13th centuries death was common um at a young age people didn't live long very common for people to lose children at a young age um and so um elegies were written all the time uh as a tribute to the person who had died the form can be anything it really doesn't matter metaphysical poetry which we're going to talk about when we get to ex to some particular examples uh but metaphysical poetry is where a particular physicality um represents something larger meta means above and I will talk about a poem by John Dunn called the flea and um the idea of a medical metaphysical poem is that it is two unlike ideas yolked by violence together so um an example would be something like fried shoes so you don't associate those two words together but in the poem the flea what makes it metaphysical is that the poet says that the love he has for his mistress his fiance um is like a flea and it's an unlikely comparison that's what it means when um when we have this expression here yolked by violence together um it's like saying our love is like a flea and in that physical symbol of the flea it takes on a metaphysical a larger symbolic meaning and we'll have a lot to say about metaphysical poetry but it's always Anchored In in a particular singular physical symbol that represents something more abstract like love honor obedience Chastity loyalty um things of that uh nature an epic is partially recognizable by content that is to say it is a poem of of national significance or of significance to the whole human race so when we're defining an epic the content is primary um Milton's uh Paradise Lost um is basically the Book of Genesis which is a huge epic because it's the whole history of mankind humankind um all told in one great big story uh sometimes though an epic can be about a national hero for example a contemporary to to Shakespeare by the name of Edmund Spencer um wrote a long long poem called the fairy queen about King Arthur and King Arthur of course is the patron saint of England and so this is an epic because Arthur represents not only Knighthood and the chel code but Arthur represents England itself the English Nation the English people and so the content of an epic is very important there is some kind of connection between Epic uh content in the form it's almost always in decolic blank verse or at least debic verse meaning always 10 syllables per line um it doesn't have to be I Amic pentameter and it doesn't necessarily have to rhyme that's part of the definition of blank verse that I'll talk about elsewhere but you see here fruit and taste and wo and man and seat and top there's no end rhyme at this but it's always 10 syllables per line so an epic is a long story that tells about a hero who represents a particular Nation uh I think you could also probably call Lord of the Rings an epic um because it is about um a culture that represents British culture uh it isn't British culture obviously but by implication it is and so we have that and the moment of course we have epic we also have something called a mock epic which is a satiric version of that there is a poem by a man named Pope um Alexander Pope who writes um uh who uses dissonance okay so he it's like he's telling a story of great significance to the whole human race but what happens in that poem is at a game of cards a young gentleman comes up behind a woman and just Snips off a locket of her hair um this is not a sin against God um it is assault um I don't mean to di to diminish the incident but um a mock epic is where you take something that is largely insignificant and inflate it so that it becomes so much larger than what it is but the idea of about an epic is it is essentially defined by its both content which is the story of a hero who represents a nation or a people and its form which is usually a syllabic it can be rhyming or blank verse it doesn't matter um a dramatic monologue is a poem where there is a speaker uh and a silent listener and we'll see when we get into some examples um there is another person as we read the poem there is a Persona who's talking to somebody else in the poem and we are kind of on the sides uh listening to that conversation once we get into the 20th century form begins to fall apart and this is an example of a second coming written around 1920 and you can see here that there is no rhyme gy Falconer hold World everywhere drowned worst intensity there's no regular meter it's not like I Amic um or pentameter or anything like that and it's built on on something um less formal and harder to Define and remember we said that um strophic poems above um are written in stanzas but poems that are not arranged uh in stanzas are said to be stiic um sprung rhythm is almost like pros so you can't really tell there's no necessarily broken lines or there's no sort of regular lines all the regularity of meter in free verse and sprung rhythm tend to disappear and it doesn't look like more conventional traditional poetry for the purposes of this course that's all you need to understand about this Great Divide it's the most important Point um there is a form of poetry called ode which is a lyric um it's built on a um the topic um or the content is a special occasion but but not the birth of a nation which is a big occasion but something a little more down to earth uh one kind of ode for example is called an epithalamium which is a wedding poem um you can see it here as an example uh but an OD is a poem written in honor of a special occasion perhaps a new king or queen is crowned uh perhaps a new uh Prince or princess is born um perhaps there's some large celebration that isn't of great National significance and again with an ode there's no particular form attached to it except to say that because it's a special occasion the lines are going to be generally longer 8 or 10 syllables per line uh with some kind of regularity um idle I'm going to leave this you might find interesting this is called concrete poetry and um this is a poem by George Herbert it's actually it becomes a very modern form but ironically this particular poem is written in the early 17th century um the early 1600s by George Herbert and um it's a poem called the alter and if you take a look at the way the words are laid out on the page you can see that this is is supposed to be an altar that this is the top of the altar here and this is the here is the pedestal on which the altar stands and then here is the uh the base on which the altar rests and the interesting thing about conrete poetry is it it clearly sends a signal to us that the Poetry was not meant to be heard necessarily but meant to be seen on the page because if you just have is read to you you don't really get the fact that this is supposed to be shaped like uh an altar so in concrete poetry the words of the poem form a kind of shape so concrete poetry is not so much about content as it is about form only or form primarily uh these two you can take a look at these are variations of modern poetry uh I'm going to leave it there but let me recap this so that you're clear so when we talk about sub genres of poetry I want you to understand that it breaks down into content and form that content is the topic or the the subject about which the the poem is focused on and the form is the shape or the the kind of Contour in which the words fit and that sub genre is sometimes defined by content only sometimes defined by Form only sometimes defined by form and content working together and finally that you can also have form and content working against each other okay