The elements of a poem | Reading | Khan Academy

- [Instructor] Hello, readers.

Let's talk about poems.

Poetry is a special kind of writing.

If ordinary writing is like talking,

then poetry is like singing.

Poetry is a way of
making art with language.

Poems can express huge ideas or feelings.

They can be about the sound
or rhythm of language,

or they can be goofy, little jokes.

It's like any other kind of writing.

Poems can be about everything

or they can be about nothing at all.

They can be funny, or sad, or sweet.

They can rhyme.

They can very much not rhyme.

And all of that is, in my
opinion, absolutely wonderful.

I think of some poems as condensed ideas

that contain a lot of ideas
in small amounts of text.

So every word matters a lot.

There's a little light
bulbs representing ideas.

So I'm gonna look at a
couple of poems today

in order to describe some parts of a poem.

Let's begin with the poem "Cat"

by Marilyn Singer.

It goes like this.

Cat.

I prefer warm fur, a perfect fire

to lie beside a cozy lap,

where I can nap,

an empty chair when she's not there.

I want heat on my feet,

on my nose, on my hide.

No cat I remember
dislikes December inside.

So the person who wrote this poem,

Marilyn singer, is the poet for stories.

The person who writes
the poem is an author,

but for poems, the writer is a poet,

but who is telling the poem?

Who's speaking?

The person whose voice we
hear in a poem is called

the speaker, which is another
thing I like about poetry.

When you're having trouble
understanding a poem,

read it aloud.

Part of the pleasure of poetry
for me is hearing the words

bounce around as you say them.

And then this poem,

I'm pretty sure the speaker is a cat.

Now you'll notice there
are only three sentences

in this poem, but they're
separated into 15 lines.

You can see these lines

have anywhere from one
to four words in them.

Lines can be as long or
as short as a poet likes,

but here the poet is creating
these line breaks to indicate

pauses and rhythms, right?

Like normally we wouldn't
start a new line here,

if this were prose,

which is what we call all
other forms of writing.

Prose uses normal sentences
and paragraphs, right?

The poet is choosing to create line breaks

in order to change the way the sentence

or the line looks on the page.

Poetry is not just about how it sounds.

Sometimes it's about how
it looks as it's written.

Now, in addition,

the poet is also using spaces
to scoot these three phrases

over as well as this word inside.

The words themselves are scooted in.

They're curled up and feeling
cozy, like a cat by a fire

in the middle of December.

You'll also notice that some
but not all of the lines

rhyme with each other.

And let's take a moment
to think for a second.

What is rhyming really?

One way to think about it is
when the ending sound of a word

matches the other ending sound
of a word like lap and nap,

or when a bunch of sounds match each other

throughout a pair of words
like remember, and December,

I want to be super clear about this part

because I was already out of high school

before I learned this thing,

but poems don't have to rhyme.

They can, but they
definitely don't have to.

I have one more poem
part to describe to you.

And to do it, I wanna use
Billy Collins poem "Litany"

which sounds like a fancy poem at first,

but then becomes much more conversational.

I'll end by reading the
first three stanzas,

which are these paragraph looking things.

Not all poems are broken into
stanzas, but this one is.

So those are some parts of the poem.

To review, a poet writes lines.

The place where each line
ends is called a line break

and a group of lines
together in a paragraph

is called a stanza.

The voice that tells us the poem,

the poem's narrator is called the speaker.

Some poems rhyme, others don't.

Cool.

Here's a snippet of
"Litany" by Billy Collins.

Litany.

You are the bread and the knife,

the crystal goblet and the wine.

You are the dew on the morning grass

and the burning wheel of the sun.

You are the white apron of the baker

and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.

However, you are not
the wind in the orchard,

the plums on the counter,
or the house of cards.

And you are certainly
not the pine scented air.

There is just no way that
you are the pine-scented air.

It is possible that you are
the fish under the bridge.

Maybe even the pigeon
on the General's head,

but you are not even close

to being the field of
corn flowers at dusk.

There's more, but I'd love
it if you looked it up

and read it aloud yourself.

You can learn anything. David out.