A City-Song for You


Today I wrote a song for you
And sang it in the street
The words of course, the clacking shoes
Honking horns were made the tune
And passing cars the beat

For you alone the song was sung
The smallest ears must be
To hear the quiet city hum
Behind the reckless pounding drum
Two hearts in perfect harmony

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/17/2009 12:28PM by aaron.

This is a terrific piece except the line:

'The smallest ears must be/To hear.'

Doesn't sound like English. Twisting up syntax to get a rhyme out of some words is not a good use of rhyme. It just distracts from the good sense and feeling of the rest of the poem.

amo,

Peter

I guess if you're Emily Dickinson you can pull that kind of thing off. The rest of us have to work harder.

A good read Aaron, I enjoyed this one.

Les

I like this...reminds me of the sounds the city made for August Rush.

Mary

Thanks Les and Mary, for stopping by.

Peter, thank you and I agree. This is my "rough draft" of my first experiment with some rhyme and meter. I will put it down and take another look in a few days. It's funny you bring up Emily Dickinson, as I was reading her just before I wrote this.




Would appreciate more constructive critique on the rhyme and meter. It moves between 6 and 8 syllables, does this work for you? Do you read it iambicly?

Cheers

Aaron,

Survey the poems posted in the forum and you will find many people who work in those device much more than I do. You would do best to go to someone who practices that form of poetry. I have spent 45 learning about traditional poetic forms and have tried to write in them from time to time, but someone like tom easyeverett would actually does well in that sphere.

Good luck,

Peter

It is almost always better to go to someone who has put a shoe on a horse, than to go to someone who theorizes abvout it.

Aaron,

I'm glad you acknowledged this as just an experimental draft exploring rhythm, because I find the content a little confusing. The images (visual and aural) are each clear, but the overall subject matter seems to lack consistency. What is being sung, and who or what is doing the singing? What is the logic leading to the closing reference to two hearts in harmony? The grammar of the second stanza isn’t clear. Perhaps I am just too tired at the end of a long day to get it. Anyway, it doesn't matter, if what you are mainly concerned with is the rhythm.

On your question about the variances between 6 and 8 syllables, it's not so common these days for poets writing in English to count syllables as such. The preference is for accentual meter, i.e. measuring a poem's rhythm by the number of 'beats' per line, when the words are said with natural speech speeds and emphases.

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Of course the beats may conform to regular metrical feet (iambs, dactyls, or whatever), and so may correspond directly to the number of syllables; but prolonged conformity of that kind can become tedious; so you often find small variances from it.

To me, the lines of your first stanza respectively beat 4, 3, 4, 4, 3. They’re all iambic, except line 4, which is trochaic for three beats, followed by a single beat

The lines of your second stanza beat 4, 3, 4, 4, 4, and they are all iambic. In accentual meter, a closing line is most often 3 beat, following a 4. Your final line feels a bit long for a closer. It feels as if there should be something more to come.

Ian

Ian, this is very good, thank you. Trochaic?

Definitions of trochee:

* noun: a metrical unit with stressed-stressed-unstressed syllables


--Rhymezone

btw, aaron, Ian and Tom would be the first people in the forum I would go to on matters on scansion and rhyme schemes.

avanti,

Peter

just saw this one for the first time. I LIKE!