The impressions, facts, and ideas a poem contains—what your poem is saying—make up the content.
What would you like your poem’s content to include? Will you discuss your personal philosophy on a particular subject? Will you talk about your love for a favorite family member or cherished pet? Will you expound on your favorite or least favorite time of year, or perhaps an experience that had a great impact on your life? While poetic standards may determine how you will compose your poem, only you can decide what your poem will be about.
In determining your content, however, you must be careful to choose a topic about which you have something to say. This may seem like a fairly obvious statement, but many writers set out to create a work about a subject that they find interesting, and when it comes time to put pen to paper, the words and the ideas do not flow. Once you find a topic about which you are passionate, it is much easier to create a poetic work infused with this passion, an energy that your readers will sense and appreciate.
You should try to avoid abstractions, ideas, and concepts. It is extremely difficult to write a good poem about such topics as love, death, war, pain, sorrow, and religion. Your readers will have their own associations for such concepts. While you may be praising love, some of your readers may only have negative associations for it. Poets have been writing about such “big” topics for so long that there is little original to say about them. In order to be able to write well about such subjects, you need to search for new and specific ways to talk about them.
When you choose your content, you should not try to shock your readers. While it is often good to challenge them, you do want your readers to finish reading your poem and, once finished, to read it again. If you include shocking images or phrases in your poem, even if they seem appropriate, you will most likely drive your readers away. For instance, if you are writing a poem about a beloved pet who was run over by a car, you should not end your poem with a vivid and grotesque description of the dog’s injuries. Rather than appeal to your readers’ sympathies, you have disgusted and repelled them.
Theme is the central idea or main topic of a work.
Every written work has a theme, whether the writer deliberately infuses her work with one or not. Whereas content includes everything that your poem contains, theme refers specifically to the main point, topic, or subject of your poem. For example, you may write about a boy who meets a girl in a beautiful garden. The two fall in love, but when the girl travels abroad for the summer, each is lead astray by another person whom they meet during their time apart. Each of the events—the meeting, their falling in love, the girl’s leaving, their temptation, and their breakup—are part of the content of the poem; the theme, or main idea, however, is that love is fragile and requires commitment to last. Do you see how the theme is part of the content of the poem but does not include all aspects of content?
Read the following poem. Make a list of ideas, impressions, or emotional reactions you have to the poem. Be sure to also list any other aspects of its content you find significant. Consider the poem’s title and its meaning as part of the poem as a whole. Once you have completed your list, compose one or two sentences in which you discuss the poem’s theme.
Mending Wall
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”
We wear our fingers rough with handing them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
“Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.” I could say “Elves” to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
Robert Frost (1914)
Once you have chosen your content, you have to think about the order of events. You need to create a sequence or a discussion that catches the reader’s attention. There is a certain flow that a narration—a story—usually follows from its start, through its middle, and to its end. Following this sequence, you must make sure that your poem flows in a way that is interesting, but also natural, so that when your poem ends, your reader will have a sense of closure.
Closure is the effect of finality, balance, and completeness that leaves the reader with a sense of fulfilled expectations.
When you begin your poem, you have to be conscious of any action that may take place within your verse. Say you are writing a poem about a baseball game. You share with your reader the discouraging record of the home team, then describe the team going into their last game of the season with an uncharacteristic optimism. The team plays better than they ever have for the first half of the game. They are delighted at their performance and really feel like they might win for the first time against a team with whom they’ve had a long-standing rivalry. Then the poem ends. Certainly, we all want to know what happened to the team. Did they win? If so, how close was the score? Did they lose? If so, how did they feel about it? As you can see, the way you end your poem can be as important as how you begin it.
Read the following poem. Think about the end of the poem and what effect it has. Do you feel a sense of closure when you complete the verse? Think about possible alternate endings that might leave the reader more satisfied. Think of some endings that would leave the reader feeling unsatisfied. Try to write your alternate endings in verse form, trying as best you can to follow any sort of rhythm or rhyme patterns that you might notice within the poem.
From The Waste Land
From “II. A Game of Chess”
When Lil’s husband got demobbed, I said—
I didn’t mince my words, I said to her myself,
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
Now Albert’s coming back, make yourself a bit smart.
He’ll want to know what you done with that money he gave you
To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there.
You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set,
He said, I swear, I can’t bear to look at you.
And no more can’t I, I said, and think of poor Albert,
He’s been in the army four years, he wants a good time,
And if you don’t give it him, there’s others will, I said.
Oh is there, she said. Something o’ that, I said.
Then I’ll know who to thank, she said, and give me a straight look.
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
If you don’t like it you can get on with it, I said.
Others can pick and choose if you can’t.
But if Albert makes off, it won’t be for a lack of telling.
You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique.
(And her only thirty-one.)
I can’t help it, she said, pulling a long face,
It’s them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.
(She’s had five already, and nearly died of young George.)
The chemist said it would be all right, but I’ve never been the same.
You are a proper fool, I said.
Well, if Albert won’t leave you alone, there it is, I said,
What you get married for if you don’t want children?
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot gammon,
And they asked me in to dinner, to get the beauty of it hot—
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight.
Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight.
Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.
T.S. Eliot (1922)
Taken from : Poetry.com (lulu.poetry) classic website
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