Line and rhythm

Presented
By
Jamila and sebastianus torino
sandri
 DEFINITION ABOUT LINE AND RHYTHM

The word line and rhythm is derived from rhythmos(Greek) which

means, ‘measured motion’. Rhythm is a literary device that demonstrates
the long and short patterns throught stressed syllables, particularly in verse
form.
For the example have a line and rhythm :

‘‘My heart is like singing bird,

Whose nest is in a watered shoot’’

(this is when christina rossetti wrote a ‘birth day’ she made the first line end
with ‘bird’ and the next line begin with ‘whose’.)

And that is fixed, Whenever her phoem is printed, it must be printed in that way.
There are three features of lines that are likely to come to your notice, when
you read and study poetry :
 The way lines end
 The breaks or pauses within lines
 The rhythms of lines
 Line: End-Stoped and Run-On

A line can end in two ways :

 End-Stoped : or
 Run-On
in an end-stopped line the meaning is complite by the close, so it finishes
with punctuation mark: in run-on line the meaning is left unfinished so
there is punctuation at the end.
The first lines of yeats’s ‘byzantium’ are end-stopped
For example :
 The unpurged image of day recede
 The emperor’s drunken soldiery are abed.
And for Whereas his ‘ leda and the swan’ begin with two run-on
lines,
‘’ A sudden blow: the great wings beating still above the staggering girl, her
thighs caressed by the dark webs.

The second lines is Run-on lines

By contrast, run-on line create feelings of expectation. At the close of a line
the meaning are completed within them. Consider the first verse of gray’s
‘elegy’ :
 For example :
O What is going to happen next?
O What is the full meaning going to be?
O Where is the thought of the poem going?
Hopkins’s ‘god’s grandeur’,which is about the presence of the glory
of god in the the world, starts with two firm end-stopped lines, and
then offers the reader an enticing run-on :

‘the world is charged with the grandeur of god. It will flame out, like
shining from shook fhoil : it gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
crushed.’

Because the line ends half way throug a smile, a great deal of expectation is
aroused. The expectation is dramatically gratified by the word, ‘crushed
easily the strongest word hopkins has yet used in the poem.
 Effect of combining End-Stopped and Run-On Lines
Sometimes very telling effects are created by combining the two shorts of lines.
Hopkins offered two end-stopped lines before moving to a Run-On, but in
wordsworth’s
“the solitary reaper” there are six restrained, End-Stopped ones before the line runs
on.
For example :
“behold her, single in the field, yon solitary haighland lass!. Reaping and singing by herself:
Stop here or gently pass!
Alone she cuts and binds the grain,
And sings a melancholy strain:
O listen ! For the vale profound,is overflowing with the sound.”
As wordsworth becomes ever more deeplay enthralled by the girl’s singing, the
emotional pressure, so to speak,builds up.
Wordsworth’s emotions that have overflowed. The change, therefore , from end-
stopped to run-on lines can be effective because it marks a change in the
emotions of the poet.
End-stopped and Run-on lines occur because two kinds of formal arranggements
meet-poetry written in lines of a specific length and the structure of individual
sentences. One of the pleasures of reading poetry is enjoying the way the poet
observes both the disciplines of verse and of grammar.
 CAESURA
If you wish to indicate the presence of a caesura, the customary
sign is ‖‖ . Caesura are worth noting because they can have marked
effects upon a poem. You should look out for three effects :
O The way they shape the emotional life is of a poem
O The humour they can help to create
O The way they can dramatise a poem’s close

- Shaping emotion
To say that caesura shape the emotional life of a poem is to say that breaks in
a line of verse help to create distinctive tones. Consider the three following
lines :
1) Sweet day. ‖‖ so cool, ‖‖ so calm, ‖‖ so bright!. (george herbert,’virtue’)
2) All’s over then : ‖‖ does truth sound bitter?(Robert browning, “the lost
mistress”)
3) I sit in the top of the three, ‖‖ my ayes closed.(Ted hughes,”hawk roosting”)
 consonance

You will not use the term “consonance” very much. It describes the effect
of like consonant but unlike vowel sounds as in ‘heat’ and ‘hate’. When you do
come across consonance, it is wroth while asking whether there is a relation in
meaning between the words. If you can write about the pleasure of finding a
closeness of meaning in the similarity of sounds.
Example for the sentence :
“come live with me and be my love...”
To the “live” with someone is to share their life, and that sharing is close to
what we mean by “love”.

Assonance
Assonance is the repetition of a vowel sound. Nevertheless, it can be effective.
Consider the following two examples :
o Prayer, the church’s banquet, angels’age.(george herbert,”prayer”)
o Such weight and thick pink bulk, set in death seemed not just dead.(“Ted
hughes,view of a pig”).
 ONOMATOPOEIA
“ONOMATOPOEIA” is the name of given to the effect of sound of words
imitating, or miming, the sound of the object. Listen to the way in which owen
uses his words to imitate the hars, mechanical sounds of guns and rifles.
Example for the sentence :
only the monstrous anger of the guns.
only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
can patter out their hasty orisons.
(“Anthem for Doomed Youth”).

TEXTURE
A useful word, though not a technical term, is “texture”. You can use it when you wish to talk about
the physikal impact of the words in a poem. When you want to write about what all those various
things add up to-the feel they have when they all work together-then it’s the most obvious word to
use. For example :
“if there pushed any ragged thistle-stalk, above it’s mates, the head was
chopped; the rents in the dock’s harsh swarth leaves, bruised as to baulk
all hope of greenness?”
The texture here is dense;there’s a feeling that a lot of words(perhaps too many) have been packed
into the line.
 “Cadance”
A very useful words thatb has been borrowed from music to talk about the
Rhyth-mical aspects of literature is CADANCE.
This movement is known as cadance. Sometimes another musical term
modulation is used to talk obout the change in the voice. Listen for istance, to
these lines from the song in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline;

“Golden girls and lads all must,

As chimney-sweepers, come to dust ”.
At the close of the first stanza of donne’s “the anniversary” the poet makes a
large claim for the strength of their love :

“only your love hath no decay;

this, no tomorrow hath , nor yesterday,
running it never runs from us away,
but truly keeps his first,last,everlasting day”.
 Beats
A lot has been said about rhythm without talking about what it is.
I think this is the right approach. The only reason for offering an account is
that it meight help you talk about it. What follows here, then, is a simple
guide to what makes rhythm.
When a word or syllable is not emphasised, it is marked like this.

“ In a lot of english verse there are either four or five beats i a line”

All that was said above about why rhytm matter could be repeated here.
The expeted Beats :

 Single out words

 Lends importance to what is being said
 Acts out the feelings of the poem
 Gives what is said a finallity.

Those are the effects of a pattern of beats.

 Writing about rhythm

There are two reasons why you should master ways of writing
about rhythm that are additional to the technical terms outlined
abouve :

 Examiner wont’t reward you just for putting a label on a matre.

 Rhythm, because it effects the impact a poem has, should be
spoken about in ways appropriate to that.

A very different effect is present in the first two lines of Herbert’s

“affliction” :
“ lord , how i am all gue , when i seek ,
what i have treasured in my memory”
 SOUND,RHYME AND FORM

*Listening to sounds
Every words that is spoken has a sound as well as a meaning.
It’s a good idea to read a lot of poetry with the expressed intention of
listening for the sounds. When you read or listen to any poem, try
bearing this question in mind :
- What effects are being produced by the sounds of the words...?
For example, Listen,for instance, to these lines :

Thou mistering me
God! Giver of breath and bread;
World’s strand , sway of the sea;
Lord of leaving and dead ,,,
(G.M. Hopkins,” The wreek of the Deutschland’)
 WRITING ABOUT SOUNDS
In writing about the fout technical terms alliteration,consonance,assonance
and onomatopoeia, it has not been posiblr to exclude other ways of
characterising sound in poetry. Let us now concentrate on a wider
vocabulary that will help you to write about the effects of sound.
Here are some possible words :
 Gently
 Whisperingly
 Stridently
 Mellifluously
 Smoothly
 Incisively
 Piercingly
 Flatly
As you will see, most of these words are closely connected with tone.
Other words are :
• Deep -light
• Harsh -shrill / how might some of these words be used ?
• Grating here the example :
• ‘the lotos blooms below the barren peak
• The lotos blows by every winding creek
THANK YOU