A little on language and poetry

I, like many other people in last week’s class, was very uninterested in “interacting” with the text. However, shortly after we actually began to do exercises in iambic pentameter, I found it to be quite interesting. I feel that that class really showed us how much we had really learned about iambic pentameter. Its really interesting to me how so many poetry writing cultures can be so different yet so alike too. The fact that the French predominantly only counted syllables in poetry, and that in England (like in the time Beowulf was written) only stressed syllables were counted. This may mean that the functions and structure of a language may dictate the popular forms of poetry within nation or a culture. In China, much of the poetry makes use of tones, rhyme, and double meanings. Tones in Chinese can be separated into four distinct tones including a neutral one. The first tone is quite high, where the second is rising from high to low, the third is kind of a dip going from high to low to medium, and the fourth is kinda high but ends abruptly. These tones can be used in poetry to form a melodic sequence. The amount of words in Chinese that have the same pronunciation makes for a lot of rhyming words, so rhyming is less restrictive. Also, the characters may have double meanings as well as the same or different pronunciations. This makes some Chinese poetry full of double meanings, which really enriches the text.