What follows is a reprise of my first-ever Poetry Friday post from May 5th, 2006, a day on which I began the post "Yep, it's 'Poetry Friday' because an entire month of poetry posts just isn't enough." Only to find out that Kelly Herrold had just invented Poetry Friday a wee bit earlier (if memory serves, although I can no longer find her first PF ( Read more... )

Today's poem is a lovely one by Tennyson, who was retelling a medieval story about the Lady Elaine of Astolat, who dies of unrequited love for Lancelot. The poem is a significant variation from the original source material, in which Elaine meets and falls in love with Lancelot, who deigns to wear her token (and her brother's armor) in a jousting ( Read more... )

Whether true or not, it's been reported that Alfred, Lord Tennyson once said that others may have written better poetry than he, but none had written poems that sounded better. He may be on to something there, because he was certainly ( as I have commented before) a master of assonance (repetition of vowel sounds), alliteration (repetition of ( Read more... )

First, a word about trope. I first heard the word in a music history class in college. I took two full years of music history, since I was a music major, and the word "trope" cropped up in the very first one, the study of Medieval and Renaissance music. I learned then that a trope is a theme, and Gregorian chants are typically tropes. Other ( Read more... )

And no, despite having the same number of syllables and starting sounds (alliteration, remember?), there's nothing asinine about it ( Read more... )