Welcome to Day 4! For a lovely Saturday stretch, today we're going to settle back with an idea of what to write about: quotations about wonder. I've got a choice of three quotations for you, so you can pick whichever one you like best:
O Lyric Love, half-angel and half-bird,
And all a wonder and a wild desire
— Robert Browning
For I dipped into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world and all the wonder that would be…
— Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Wonder—is not precisely Knowing
And not precisely Knowing not—
— Emily Dickinson
All these poets are out of copyright, so you can use their lines as an epigraph (a quote at the top) and then write your own response to them however you please.
You could do this as free verse, or if you fancy trying a type of poem, I have a couple of serving suggestions for you.
The first serving suggestion is a golden shovel: you take the words of the quotation (or a short phrase from the quotation, eg "all a wonder and a wild desire") and write then down the right-hand side of your notebook, one per line. Those are your end-words for each line of your poem. Your poem will have as many lines as there are words in your quote, so the full Robert Browning quote would make a 16-line poem (treating "half-angel" and "half-bird" as two words each) and just that shorter phrase from it, "all a wonder and a wild desire", would make a 7-line poem. You can read more about golden shovels here. And as I suggested for the chain poem on Day 1, this is another form where it's best to go with the flow, writing to find out where it goes rather than having a plan of what you want to say.
The second serving suggestion is a glosa: you use each line of the quote as the last line of a whole stanza of its own. The loose form of a glosa is that you borrow any number of lines from the other poet, you can write stanzas of any length, and you can use any rhyme scheme: copy theirs, invent your own, or none at all. If you have some time to spare, want to stretch your poetry legs, and fancy writing a more traditional glosa, the conventions for that go like this:
- Borrow four lines from another poet (so you'll need to google your quote to get another two lines of that poem from above or below the quote)
- Each stanza is 10 lines long, ending with their line as the 10th
- Lines 6, 9, and 10 rhyme. Other rhymes are up to you.
I sway and glaze in stumbling heat; my eyes
wonder at the dancing dots; I see smells,
do you? The fresh-laid tar is twilight skies:
you see its dark aroma, yes? The bells
feel like shattering stars; privet’s casting spells
today. You see me sway: you surely see,
as well, the underworld? The Book of Kells?
I cling to consciousness; I laugh that we
have mingled minds like scent – my blithe surmise
felt real as smells and colours. Heatstroke lies.
The Meddling with Poetry course explores a host of different poetry forms as well as the musicality of language, poetic imagery, and other aspects of the poetic. It's 8 weeks long, one evening a week, and absolute beginners and experienced writers are equally welcome. You can read more details and book a place here.
