Epic poems can be similar to the length of a novel and usually showcase a hero as he protects his people. It contains multiple four-line stanzas with an ABAB rhyme scheme and alternates between four and three sets of stressed and unstressed syllables.Įxample: “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor ColeridgeĮpic: Epic poetry traditionally details a hero's journey. There are four main types of narrative poems: ballad, epic, idyll, and lay.īallad: A ballad recounts the dramatic events of a hero’s story. Modern narrative poems do not always follow a specific rhyme or rhythm, as it is not necessary to memorize the works. Structure: While narrative poems do have specific rhyme schemes and metrical patterns (series of stressed and unstressed syllables), there is no universal pattern that poets must follow. man, society, nature) conflictĭialogue: Incorporates conversations between two or more characters These elements include the following:Įxposition: Identifies the setting and characters involved in the plotĬharacterization: Details characters with developed traitsĬonflict: Introduces and resolves either an internal (man vs. Story: Narrative poems contain many of the same traits found in short stories and novels. Instead, the speaker is part of the story and narrates exactly what takes place. Narrator: Typically, the narrator of a narrative poem is not the author. Narrative poems typically include the following elements: Contemporary poets continue to use the form to incorporate verse into storytelling.Īncient and famous narrative poems like Beowulf and Homer’s The Iliad may have been sung. The course will inevitably be a kind of introduction to Yeats, but it will introduce him through the poems he made and not through explanations.Initially an oral tradition used as a means to record history, narrative poems follow a specific rhyme and rhythm, making them easier to remember. We shall also ask ourselves whether the poet who was still writing in 1939 can be thought of as the same person as the one who emerged from the Celtic twilight of the late Victorian age. That first sensuous experience of the poet’s words will then be followed by class discussion of those words and their possible meanings.

Each class will begin with the poems of the day being read aloud, so that we are all able to absorb and appreciate the heady richness of Yeats’s music.

We shall inevitably touch on the context of Yeats’s work – on Irish history, on the great crises of the early 20th century, on the development of literary modernism, and on his own complex and eventful life – but the main purpose of the course will be to discuss events of language, the verbal constructs printed on the page. It will be the aim of this course to read closely, analyse and discuss in detail a small selection of these great lyrics: ‘The Stolen Child’, ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’, ‘Easter 1916’ ‘The Second Coming’, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, ‘Among School Children’ and so on. Scarcely a year passed in Yeats’s adult life when he did not produce a substantial lyric with some claim to immortality. However we judge him, though, it cannot be disputed that, in a period of roughly half a century, Yeats produced poem after poem, day by day and week by week, all of them intensely musical, skilfully constructed and varied in subject and theme.

Others are of the view that he was too self-consciously histrionic – too much of a poseur – to be rated that highly. Some would argue that the Irishman William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was the greatest English-speaking poet since the death of Wordsworth in 1850.

Lyrical poems