UPDATE:
When I initially posted this method of getting blog points, there were some gorgeous responses, but a couple of them lost points for not quite adhering to this form. We're going to be reading another poem next week that is written in heroic couplets (Samuel Johnson's Vanity of Human Wishes, so I'd encourage you to have another go at writing them (particularly if you didn't give it a shot the first time this post appeared). Just be sure to count those syllables and make sure your lines rhyme!
THE ORIGINAL POST
Dryden, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, and pretty much every significant eighteenth-century poet wrote poems in the form of heroic couplets.
Heroic couplets consist of ten syllables per line (preferably iambic pentameter, but rhythmic meter is not essential), rhymed aa bb. If you need an example, look at Absalom and Achitophel or our upcoming poem, The Vanity of Human Wishes
.
You can respond to this post by writing 3 - 4 heroic couplets (that is, 6 - 10 lines of verse) as follows:
A. Your verses do not need to stand alone as an entire poem -- feel free to write as if they are an excerpt from a larger work.
B. Your subject must be ONE (1) of the following things: (1) health care reform, (2) an entertainment celebrity of your choosing, (3) the landscape of Champaign-Urbana.
C. You must write as if your verses, with your real name attached, will be posted on your Facebook profile, taped up in the elevator of your dorm or apartment building, printed in the Daily Illini and your hometown newspaper, and distributed as a handout in class (no, all these things will not happen—but that’s the degree of publicity you should imagine).
D. Your verses should NOT be funny (wry wit is another matter...). We are familiar with rhymed verse written to comic ends; rhyming for other purposes does not sit quite as easily—that’s why I’m asking you to do it.
New deadline: midnight Saturday (9/19).
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5 comments:
Water flowing in never ending hymn
Only to caress her blades at her whim
Untouched by ravishing hands of anger
Illuminating crimson savor
Hidden within thumping sounds of iron
Passion and Smug lay, grin and reap a yearn
A debate on health enters the public
At stake, eminence of the republic.
Filled with mockery, a government bill
Showcasing the faults of Insurance skill,
The health of the people it must partake
or a crippling model that business will make.
Chaos, fervor of taken liberties,
Are lies organized by the enemies
Shouting only makes worse of the latter,
a town hall idle yet filled with chatter.
Among the golden waves of maize,
A quiet brood of buildings lay
With such wonderful gardens and copses of trees,
It can the most jaded critic please.
Yet in meditation on it all I become most forlorn,
When I remember it's still all just surrounded by corn.
The morning light so softly fills,
vast lands of scholarly hills.
A' last she awakes again,
raising open arms end to end.
Her beauty so everlasting,
an expression of love overcasting.
Uplifting the spirits within,
preparing the youth to begin.
Oh' Alma of the past,
your passionate welcome never surpassed.
Inflated number has been reported,
American minds have been distorted.
He calls for system wide reformation,
To help out a small part of the nation.
Health care would fall to the pace of a snail,
Soon truth will spread, and the reform will fail.
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