Inspirational Quote
Poetry Newsletter 1-12-06
Welcome to the Poetry Newsletter, a place for poets and poetry lovers to read, learn, and be inspired.
"A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort."
–Herm Albright (1876-1944)
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Daily Poetry
Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms
By Thomas Moore
Believe me, if all those endearing young charms,
Which I gaze on so fondly today,
Were to change by tomorrow, and fleet in my arms,
Like fairy-gifts fading away,
Thou wouldst still be adored, as this moment thou art,
Let thy loveliness fade as it will,
And around the dear ruin each wish of my heart
Would entwine itself verdantly still.
It is not while beauty and youth are thine own,
And thy cheeks unprofaned by a tear
That the fervor and faith of a soul can be known,
To which time will but make thee more dear;
No, the heart that has truly loved never forgets,
But as truly loves on to the close,
As the sunflower turns on her god, when he sets,
The same look which she turned when he rose.
—–
Back on the topic of rhythm, Thomas Moore’s poem is a perfect example of another tool that poets use to create a rhythmic pattern to their work. Remember that rhyming is not the only way to do this.
While rhyming is certainly present in Moore’s poem, he also uses a technique that was very much in vogue at the time he was writing: end stopping.
If you look at the poem above, you will notice that most lines end with a form of punctuation, either a comma or a period. Each of the lines ends at a logical place in the sentence structure. For example, if you wrote out the entire first sentence without punctuation, you would see that it takes up the whole first stanza. But the commas come at logical pauses between each phrase, as in, “Believe me, if all those endearing young charms, which I gaze on so fondly today…”
End stopping is less is fashion among modern poets, who tend to cut up their lines and end them or begin them with particular words they wish to emphasize. This is called enjambment. So a modern poet might rewrite the first few lines of Moore’s poem as follows:
Believe me
if all those endearing young
charms which I gaze on so
fondly today were to change by
tomorrow and fleet
in my arms like fairy
gifts fading away thou wouldst still
be adored as this moment
thou art.
Now try this line breaking technique on one of your own poems, end-stopped or not, and see what happens to the meaning.
**Please refer friends to this poetry blog who might be interested!**
Poetry Lesson
End-stopped is a term denoting a line of verse in which a logical or rhetorical pause occurs at the end of the line, usually marked with a period, comma, or semicolon.
Example: The first stanza of this work by Lord Byron is end-stopped:
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.