Echo By Christina Rosetti, The Weary Blues, And The Weary Blues

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Poetry can be more than just words on a page. It is a short amount of writing that displays a story, image, or song using many interesting techniques. Some of those techniques are rhyming, repetition, meter, and alliteration. Poets can use these writing tools to make something amazing and insightful to the person reading it. Two poems that use these approaches well are “Echo”, by Christina Rosetti, and, “The Weary Blues”, by Langston Hughes. Each of these writers have their own style when using these concepts, and their differences help make each of their poems unique. The first technique that each of these poems include is rhyme. When you think of poetry, rhyming usually pops into your head, but not all poetry contains the same type of rhyming.
That means that the A lines rhyme, the B lines rhyme, and the C lines rhyme as well. An example of that is displayed in the first six lines of the poem. “Come to me in the silence of the night; / Come to me in the speaking silence of a dream; / Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright / As sunlight on a stream; / Come back in tears, / O memory, hope, love of finished years” (Rosetti). As you can see, Rosetti rhymes night and bright, dream and stream, and then tears and years. That stanza, as well as all of the others, follow the ABAB CC pattern. When it comes to “The Weary Blues”, Hughes uses a different rhyming sequence. As I read Hughes’ poem, the rhyming pattern was hard to pick up. He doesn’t have a certain arrangement that he follows like Rosetti does. Sometimes he rhymes two lines and then has a line or two that don’t rhyme with anything at all. An example of this is presented during the song that is sang in the middle of the poem. “’Ain’t got nobody in this world, / Ain’t got nobody but ma self. / I’s gwine to quit ma frownin’ / And put ma troubles on the shelf’” (Hughes). In this song, self and shelf rhyme, but
The meter of a poem is basically the rhythm. In “Echo”, Rosetti sets up a meter called iambic pentameter. The entire poem is not in this meter, but a majority is. An example of iambic pentameter is, “Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live / My very life again tho’ cold in death:” (Rosetti). An iamb is when a “foot” is unstressed then stressed. So in the first line, yet is unstressed and come is stressed. That makes one iamb. Since it is an iambic pentameter, that means there are five iambs. Those iambs are, “Yet come”, “to me”, “in dream”, “that I”, and finally, “may live”. Hughes also plays with meter in, “The Weary Blues”. He has a play on iambic pentameter, but his has a bit of a catch. Like Rosetti, he doesn’t keep the same meter the entire time. An example of Hughes’ iambic pentameter is in the first two lines of the poem. “Drowning a drowsy syncopated tune, / Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,” (Hughes). An iamb is unstressed, then stressed, but what about Hughes’ first few words? The word “droning” and the word “Rocking” are actually stressed then unstressed which makes them trochees and not iambs. That is how Rosetti and Hughes’ poems differ. They are both considered iambic pentameters, but Hughes just adds a little twist to his. Having meter alows the author room to play with the rhythm of the poem and how the reader interoperates

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