Editing Rhythm Poetry
The following poem was written by 8 year old Lucy,a winning poet from one of my school competitions. I chose it because it uses some fantastic poetic techniques such as alliteration, assonance, metaphors, as well as including rhyme and near rhymes. More importantly, the poem made me want to ‘meet the lemurs’ and I could understand their appeal because of the fabulous imagery that Lucy used. The only advice I could offer to this very clever young poet was on how to achieve a consistent rhythm, and how that would affect the poem, and she was gracious enough to allow me to revise her poem as a teaching aid to anyone who would like to understand about rhythm poetry and how to edit a poem to achieve a consistent rhythm without losing the context or content. This is the result……..
| Meet the Lemurs at Yorkshire Wildlife Park by Lucy aged 8 Lively, leaping lemurs Stripy tails flying Pointy faces peeping Walking the tightrope A walk in lemur woods |
Meet the Lemurs at Yorkshire Wildlife Park
by Lucy aged 8, revised by Angela Yardy to Come see the lively, leaping lemurs Above, the stripy tails fly Their pointy faces peeping through They walk the tightrope without thought, A walk in lemur woods is something |
When you look closely, the entire content of the poem is exactly the same; I have neither added nor taken away any details, but have just changed the order of the words or lengthened sentences to fit a specific metre (rhythm) called the Iambic Heptameter (it sounds like a clever, showy phrase, but it’s simple to understand if you look at this link on rhythm poetry to understand about specific metres.) In basic terms, the ‘iambic’ refers to the bounce of the rhythm (in this case each ‘foot’ goes ‘Di Dum’, with the stress on the second syllable), and the ‘heptameter’ refers to how many of those ‘feet’ are repeated on one line (ie, hept=7), but my teaching on rhythm poetry will lead you through it step by step (quite appropriate as rhythm poetry is measured in ‘feet’!)
USEFUL TIP: Notice that each line in my revised version is longer than the original. I often find that it is easier to edit poems with longer lines, because it is easier to add ‘filler’ words like ‘quite’, ‘maybe’ ‘really’ etc to keep the rhythm consistent than it is to remove words which may be crucial to the content and context of what you want to say. With shorter verses and lines compromises sometimes have to be made when the preferred words cannot feasibly fit.
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