Surveying Structure (Step 5) | Close Reading Poetry for Beginners

well welcome everyone to the final lecture in our close reading series surveying structure in this lecture I want to talk about structure as something that affects our experience with a poem so there are a few main types of structure that we'll be looking at today the first is visual structure how a poem is organized on the page the second is audible structure the way it's organized according to sound thirdly we're going to be talking a little bit about emotional structure how sometimes the form itself moves with the emotional transits of a poem and then finally we'll be looking at line endings specifically engagement and that's when a line of poetry ends without any punctuation at the end of the line and you're just left with that blank space we're going to be talking about what that does so we'll be thinking about how structure affects our experience with the poem now most poetry today is written and meant to be heard as well as seen we see that once poetry moves from its specifically oral context into a written form that it now becomes partially a visual art and we can say that our first encounter with a poem before we even read it is the way it greets us on the page the way the black ink is sitting there organized among the white space some forms are immediately recognizable as sonnet you can usually tell is just a 14 line chunk very identifiable you might also think about the shape poems that were popular in the 16th and 17th centuries and we're looking at those here one of the great masters of shape poetry is George Herbert and I want to look at Easter wings look at this this is the way it was printed in 1633 you actually had to turn the book to read it not sure if that's how Herbert wanted them printed they were printed after his death however here they are on the page now I want to talk about how this is not just a shape poem it's just not a cutesy way of organizing verse but it actually contributes to the experience and meaning of the poem so let's look at Easter wings in in a normal block of text here now notice as you're reading you descend into narrower lines he begins Lord who created ...