Poets achieve a sense of rhythm without using stanzas, rhyming, or meter by using specific literary devices that help incorporate rhythm and a particular mood into the poem. Line length is an essential tool that many poets use when writing free verses. The reason it matters is that the line length allows the writer to control the way we read through the text, whether it can be slower or faster. Furthermore, the range of the lines can influence the effect on the reader and suggestions about what the poet might have been thinking. Shorter lines are pronounced quickly and breathlessly, thus creating a rhythm and a pattern of similarity in the text. In this case, the poet might invite the reader to imagine a situation, where the things surrounding the poem might be happening swiftly and hastily. Longer lines can be read more deliberately, creating a slower tone and allowing the reader to enjoy every detail of the poem. According to Tsur (2015) “there are other means to indicate line ending: first of all, “punctuational pauses”; but also intonation contour, and some more elusive cues, such as the lengthening of the last speech sound or syllable, or over articulation of the word boundaries, e.g., by inserting a stop release or a glottal stop where appropriate”. Using line breaks can also emphasize essential ideas and concepts in the text.
Alliteration is a literary device, where the first sound in a series of words is the same. Even though there might be no set rhyme pattern or structure, alliteration allows feeling the rhythmical flow in the lyrics. The repetition of similar sounds lets the reader.
‘The Colonel’ by Carolyn Forche is a perfect example of an open-form poem. The author narrates the poem in a monotonous manner, allowing the reader to feel their own emotions on the issue presented in the text. Line length is also used by the author to express and retell the story so that it affects the reader. For instance, “…He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this.” The author describes such horrible things in short lines to prevent the text from any emotional reaction. Thus, while the author seems detached from the events that happened to her, the readers, on the contrary, feel the situation on the intimate level.
‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’ by Langston Hughes is another example of how well the free verse poetry can have a rhythm and flow despite lacking all the regular aspects of traditional poetry. The repetition in words and structure varies but still creates an organized writing. Therefore, there is a rhyme that occurs throughout the text. The poem centres around a sharp image, a metaphor of the rivers, which means the lifelong journey of a man. The whole poem mimics the flow of the river because the author skillfully switches the line length as in how the waters of the river move.
‘The Playboy Calendar and the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam’ by Martin Espada is a poem full of humorous events and references. The author uses imagery as a poetic device to describe the poem vividly and extract a particular reaction from the reader. While the poem feels very personal and relatable, it also has a fantastic structure and rhythm pattern. For example: “…a wrestler who crushed the coach’s nose with his elbow, fractured the fingers of all his teammates, could drink half a dozen vanilla milkshakes, and signed up with the Marines because his father was a Marine.” The last two fragments of the poem use repetition of the word “Marine”, therefore these parts have a rhyme to them. The first two parts have an occasional internal line, a verse occurring inside the text, while the reader recites it.
Finally, the poems can be very well acclaimed to be “poems about resistance” as each poem centres on different struggles that writers go through in their lives and describe. In the poem, ‘The Colonel’ Forche depicts her encounter with the colonel in the context of the Civil War that can be seen as resistance itself. ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’ is a battle against the stereotypes of African-American people, and it highlights the importance of the roles they play in society. The author of the poem was also one of the leaders of the Harlem Renaissance.
Works Cited
Tsur, Reuven. (2015). Free Verse, Enjambment, Irony A Case Study. Style. 49. 35-45.