CHAPTER II THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
A. THE NATURE OF POETRY
What is poetry? A short piece of imaginative writing, of a personal nature and laid out in lines
is the usual answer. Will that do? Poetry definitions are difficult, as is aesthetics generally. What is distinctive
and important tends to evade the qualified language in which we attempt to cover all considerations. Perhaps we could say that poetry was
responsible attempts to understand the world in human terms through literary composition.
The terms beg many questions, of course, but poetry today is commonly an amalgam of three distinct viewpoints.
For traditionalists a poem is an expression of a vision that is rendered in a form intelligible and pleasurable to others and so likely to
arouse kindred emotions. Otherwise Modernists think a poem is an autonomous object that may or may not represent the real world but is
created in language made distinctive by its complex web of references. Postmodernists look on poems as collages of current idioms that are
intriguing but self-contained — they employ, challenge andor mock preconceptions, but refer to nothing beyond themselves.
On the other hand, some romantics had a point that poetry is the universal language used by the poets to communicate their ideas in
beautiful words. As a universal language, poem has existed almost in all ages. The people in the world always regard it as one of the most
important expressions. Where there are people there are poem. Poem also a unique media of communication, created in a brief and
concentrated form of language, differs from the other literary works. Accordingly, poem can give its meaning intently. The objects to be
communicated in a poem are various. B. SOME FUNDAMENTAL ELEMENTS OF POETRY
Understanding poetry means understanding the works of poetry it self, depend on the work we read and the response that we had
concerning the poetry that we read, no poem is ever completed,
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it means that the poet always leaves some work for his reader, a poem
only prompt us, stimulates us to further consideration. In contrary, there are some of fundamental elements that should be known to analyze
poetry, some of those are: 1.
Imagery Imagery may be defined as the representation through language of
sense experience. Poetry indirectly appeals to our sense through imagery. Imagery is more incidental to a poem than metaphor,
symbols and theme and they are often confused. Nevertheless, an image should conjure up something more than the mere mentioning of
the object or situation. A mistake often made to take every image as
3
See Reaske. How to analyze poetry. P. 9
though it were a symbol or metaphor. Frost assumed “that pressing the poem too hard
”.
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There are seven kinds of imagery, first of all is visual imagery; it is something seen in the mind’s eye. Second is, auditory imagery; it’s
represents a sound. Third is, olfactory imagery; it’s represent smell and nasal sense. Forth is, gustatory imagery; it’s represents a taste.
Fifth is, tactile imagery; it’s represents touch and skin feel. Sixth is, organic imagery; it’s represents internal sensation, like hunger, thirst,
fatigue or fear, etc. seventh is, kinesthetic imagery; it’s represents movement or tension.
2. Figure of speech Figure of speech is a way of saying something other than the literal
meaning of the words. More over this topic will be discussed as the theoretical framework in the next discussion.
3. Meter Meter is to determine how many feet in a line of poem. Naturally
the English language falls into iambic
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patterns of accent or stress. Meter governs the placement of accents and the length of the line.
Meter can be diagrammed to examine these elements, which is called scansion. We can scan the poem to discover the placements of the
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httpwww.frostsfriends.orgimagery
5
Every line in has number of feet. One foot called monometer, two feet called dimeter, three feet called trimester, four feet called tetrameter, five feet called pentameter, six feet called hexameter,
seven feet called heptameter, eight feet called octameter. See Reaske. P. 16.
accents. This helps us to read the poem correctly. Meter has a great influence on the flow and the rhythm of the poem.
4. Rhythm
Rhythm in poetry is built by the patterns of repeated sounds. The patterns of sound have an effect to delightful the sound, the words and
the accents of the poem which is establish in our mind as a collection of associations of sounds and meaning. The pattern is established in
the repetition of lines having the same number of syllables, also by the steady use of accent in the same way, furthermore it brings us to our
first major contemplation. 5.
Rhyme Rhyme is the end of the line, mostly in the same consonants or
vowel and sounds, its called perfect rhyme. But, eventually, there are rhyme which has not same in the consonant or vowel but its identical
in sound. In contrary, identical in consonant or vowel but it’s not same in sounds. Rhyme divided into two kinds; masculine and feminine.
Masculine rhyme is when the last syllable is stressed and feminine is not. Frost used rhyme mostly of his works, but Frost also made his
works in blank verse.
6. Content
Content is the story line that brought by the poem, it is speak about narration, description, or the major theme of the poem. It is sometimes
make a surface meaning of the poem. It is possible to respond to a poem without fully understanding every word or phrases and
sometimes meaning evolve as you continue to study a poem. Having preliminary scheme or idea of what poem is about, can be an
imperative first stair towards a fuller and more certain appreciative.
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B. EXPLICATION
Explication or explanation is an examination of literary work to exaggerate the work, to be known in every part of poem,
for the relation of each part, and the correlation of each to the whole as well.
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Understanding the poem wholly needs the explication in mean. The explication itself will give general assumption,
characteristic of the poem, metrical organization until the content and meaning of the poem.
C. THE NATURE OF FIGURE OF SPEECH
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Croft, Steven and Cross Helen. 2000. Literature, Criticism, and style. Oxford: Oxford University Press. P. 53
7
Perrine, Lawrence. Op.Cit.P. 347
Figure of speech is a language that is symbolic or metaphorical and not meant to be taken literally.
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It is also as speech or group of words worn to present exacting emphasize to an idea or attitude. The special
emphasis is typically accomplished by the users conscious deviation from the strict literal sense of a word, or from the more commonly used
form of word order or sentence construction. From ancient times to the present, such figurative locutions have been extensively employed by
orators and writers to strengthen and make fancy their styles of speech and work of art.
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Figure of speech used by Frost to say something other than the literal meaning of the words. For example, “the entire world’s a stage” Frost
often referred to them simply as “figures” Frost said, “Every poem I write is figurative in two senses.
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It will have figures in it, of course; but it’s also a figure in itself- a figure for something, and it’s made so
that you can get more than one figure out of it.”
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1. Kinds of Figure of Speech
a. Metaphor
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Perrin, Lawrence and R.ARP, Thomas.1992. Sound and sense: An Introduction to poetry, Eight edition, Southern Methodist University.
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Figure of Speech.
Microsoft® Student 2007
[DVD]. Redmond, WA: Microsoft Corporation, 2006
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Northrop Frye said in his second essay. Ethical Criticism: Theory of symbol: “Whenever we read anything, we find our attention moving in two directions at once. One direction is outward or
centrifugal in which we keep going outside our reading, from the individual words to the things they mean, or in practice, to our memory of the conventional association between them. The other
direction is inward or centripetal, in which we try to develop from the words a sense of the larger verbal pattern they make.
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httpwww.frostfriends.orgfigurative
Metaphor is figure of speech which compares one thing directly.
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Usually a metaphor is created through the use of some form of the verb “to be” for instance, if we say “you’re your
shining face is like a bright moon”, the bright moon is refer directly to the shining face. The metaphor in other words
establishes an analogy between object without actually saying that is establishing this contrast. When the poet uses metaphor he
transfers the qualities and association of one object to another in order to make the latter more vivid in our mind.
b. Personification Personification is the method of handing over human
characteristics to nonhuman objects, abstractions or ideas. Attributing personal form to such nonhuman objects and ideas is a
standard rhetorical device in poetry. Thus we recurrently find poets dealing with the moon as lady, referring her beauty. We utter
about the lady beauty and about Old Man River. In allegorical dramas or poems certain characters are personifications of various
qualities like virginity or desirable quality, iniquity or eternity, etc. the poet thus personifies qualities or describes them as if they were
in fact people. c.
Parallelism
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See Christopher Russell Reaske page 36 in How to Analyze Poetry. Monarch Press. 1966.
Parallelism is a principle advocating that ideas of identical significance or consequence should be treated at equal length
within a poem.
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For instance, one wrote a poem which was proposed to study the limitation of men and women, and yet only
devoted one third as much space and thought to women as it did to men, then there would be a deficient of parallelism. Parts of effort
should be analogous with each other so that there is no tremendous disproportion in prominence. It would be as great a fault of course
to devote equal thinking and space to concepts which were not equally important. If a poem was purportedly about a barn and yet
the poet spent most of his time describing the farmer who owned the barn, there would again be a lack of parallelism; in short,
parallelism requires equal treatment for equally important aspects of the matter under consideration.
d. Metonymy
Metonymy is the substitution of a word closely associated with other word in place of that other word. For an example,
Indonesia’s former President Soeharto mal-wisdom will associate to the place where he lived; it’s called Cendana wisdom, at that
time its superb and final decision. For the poet usually make name of place to configure his poem thematically with metonymy. For
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See Christopher Russell Reaske page 38 in How to Analyze Poetry. Monarch Press. 1966.
instance; Frost uses Wood in his poem refer to the metonymy of home, place or rule.
e. Theme Theme is the central concept developed in a poem. It is the
basic idea which the poet is trying to convey and which, accordingly, he allows to direct his imagery. Most of the images, in
other words, are designed to present the central theme, or main idea of the poem. The theme is the first place. It is usually an abstract
concept which becomes concrete through the idiom and imagery.
CHAPTER III EXPLICATION OF THE POEMS
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