WEBVTT

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Just for a moment,

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focus on your breath.

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In slowly.

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Out slowly.

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In slowly.

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Out.

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The same pattern repeats within
everyone one of us

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and consider your pulse.

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The beat is built into the very
fabric of our being.

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Simply put, we're creatures of rhythm
and reptition.

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It's central to our experience,

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rhythm and repetition,

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rhythm and repetition.

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On, and in,

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and on, and out.

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And we delight in those aspects everyday,

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in the rhythm of a song,

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the beat of the drum,

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the nod of your head,

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or in the repetition of soup cans,

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the rows of an orchard,

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the artistry of petals.

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Pattern can be pleasure.

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In language, rhythm and repetition
are often used

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as the building blocks for poetry.

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There's the rhythm of language,

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created by syllables and their emphasis,

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such as, "So long as men can breath
or eyes can see."

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And there's the repetition of language
at multiple levels:

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the repetition of letters,

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"So long live this
and this gives life to thee,"

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of sounds,

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"breath," "see," "thee,"

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and of words.

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With so many uses, repetition
is one of the poet's most malliable

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and relaible tools.

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It can lift or lull the listener,

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amplify or diminish the line,

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unify or diversify ideas.

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In fact, even rhythm itself,

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a repeated pattern of stressed syllables,

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is a form of repeition.

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Yet for all its varied uses,

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too much repetition can backfire.

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Image writing the same sentence
on the blackboard twenty times,

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again, and again, and again, and again,

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or imagine a young child clamoring
for her mother's attention,

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"Mom, mom, mommy, mom, mom."

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Not exactly what we might call poetry.

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So what is poetic repetition,
and why does it work?

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Possibly most familiar is rhyme,

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the repetition of like sounds
in word endings.

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As with Shakespeare's example,

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we often encounter rhyme
at the ends of lines.

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Repetition in this way creates
an expectation.

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We begin to listen for the repetition
of those similar sounds.

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When we hear them, 
the found pattern is pleasurable.

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Like finding Waldo in the visual chaos,

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we hear the echo in the oral chatter.

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Yet, rhyme need not surface solely
at a line's end.

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Notice the strong "i" sound in,

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"So long lives this 
and this gives life to thee."

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This repetition of vowel sounds
is called assonance

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and can also be heard 
in Eminem's "Lose Yourself."

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Notice how the "e" and "o" sounds
repeat both within in

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and at the end of each line:

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"Oh, there goes gravity,

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Oh, there goes rabbit,
he choked,

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he so mad but he won't
give up that easy,

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no, he won't have it,

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he knows his whole back's
to these ropes."

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The alternating assonance
creates its own rhythm,

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and invites us to try our own voices
in echoing it.

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Similarly, consonance is the repetition
of like consonant sounds,

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such as the "l" and "th" in,

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"So long lives this
and this gives life to thee."

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In fact, this type of specific consonance,

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which occurs at the beginning of words

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may be familiar to you already.

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It's called alliteration,
or front rhyme.

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Great examples include tongue twisters.

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Betty bought some butter 
but the butter was bitter

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so Betty bought some better butter
to make the bitter butter better.

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Here, the pleasure in pattern is apparent
as we trip over the consonance

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both within words and at their start.

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Yet tongue twisters also reflect the need
for variation in poetic repetition.

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While challenging to say,

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they're seen by some
as lesser imitations of poetry,

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or gimmicky because they hammer
so heavily on the same sounds,

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closer to that blackboard-style 
of repetition.

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Ultimately, this is the poet's 
balancing act,

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learning when to repeat

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and when to riff,

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when to satisfy expectations,

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and when to thwart them,

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and in that balance, 
it may be enough to remember

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we all live in a world of wild variation

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and carry with us our own breath and beat,

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our own repetition wherever we go.