WHAT ARE THE PARTS OF A POEM? (STRUCTURE) - LITERATURE - 2025

The main parts of a poem are the title, verse, stanza, rhythm, meter, and author. Poetry is a literary genre that uses the aesthetics and rhythmic qualities of language, such as euphony (sound of words considered pleasant) and meter (set of regularities in verses), to evoke meanings or feelings, often hidden or symbolic.

The poem is the literary product of poetry, that is, a literary text that meets the characteristics to be considered part of the genre of poetry. The main characteristic to classify a literary work as a poem is the presence of the verse, which is the unit in which a poem is divided.

However, prose (a form of writing similar to natural language) is also used in the writing of a poem, which can be in the same way differentiated from a story or a novel by the presence of rhythm or the absence of a formal or direct narrative.

In poetry, various literary forms and conventions are used that can be used to evoke different emotional responses, make sense of words or "effects", such as the use of rhythm in verses to achieve an effect of musicality.

In addition, the characteristics may vary according to its historical context or the literary traditions from which it comes or the language in which it has been written.

Structure: main parts of a poem

Due to the disengagement of restrictions and conventions for writing poetry among contemporary authors, it is difficult to identify certain elements in examples of contemporary poetry.

However, most of the elements of a poem can still be found in most current poems, although it may be diluted or less conventional.

1 - Verse

The verse refers to the minimum unit in which a poem can be divided, it is represented by a single metric line.

Unlike prose, which is divided by grammatical signs, and is made up of sentences or paragraphs, the verse depends on the meter, the rhythm, the rhyme or even the author's purpose.

Thus, the verse can be classified according to the structure of the poem. With the presence of rhyme, there are the rhymed verse, the loose verse and the blank verse.

In addition, there are verses according to the number of syllables of these (minor art and major art). As also according to their accentual disposition, that is, the rhythm that they present.

The following is an excerpt from the poem La Bailarina de los Pies Desnudos, by the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío:

In this fragment the verses can be differentiated in a simple way, each one being a line of text, followed by another line of text, without a blank line that separates them. In this case, the author separates the verses according to the number of syllables.

2 - Verse

Example of a stanza by Miguel Hernández

The stanza is another unit used to divide a poem, which is made up of a certain number of verses.

The stanza depends on the structure of the poem, or the intention of the author, and is usually separated by a full stop and a blank space. It can be comparable to a paragraph in prose.

Depending on the number of verses of which a stanza is composed, it receives different names. For example, the joy of two lines or the limerick of five lines.

In addition, the stanzas that contain a poem and the verses that in turn contain these, can define the structure of this, as is the case of the sonnets, made up of four stanzas, two of 4 verses and two of 3.

The following is the poem Los Amigos, by the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar:

The first thing that we could determine when identifying the stanzas of a poem are the blank spaces.

These spaces mark the division between stanzas, and in turn, these spaces are preceded by a full stop.

This poem presents a Sonnet structure, which has four stanzas, of which the first two are four lines long, and the last two three lines long.

3 - Rhythm

Rhythm is a characteristic and an element present in most of the arts, and it can be visual or auditory.

In general, rhythm can be defined as a flow of movement, controlled or measured, sound or visual, produced by the ordering of different elements of the medium in question. In other words, it is the feeling of continuity or flow in a work.

In poetry, rhythm represents a basic feature to determine the structure of a poem, and it is one of the most important characteristics of current poetry.

This can be given by various factors, the distribution of accents in each verse being its most common form.

The following is the poem Godzilla in Mexico, from the Chilean poem Roberto Bolaño:

The first thing we can see in this poem is that the length of each verse is considerably uneven.

This is precisely an example of free verse poetry. Here, we can notice that the author nevertheless divides the poem into verses, therefore, it is not written in prose.

The main criterion for choosing where to separate a line of text in free verse poetry is rhythm.

In Godzilla in Mexico, Roberto Bolaño sets the rhythm of the poem with the help of punctuation marks, using the comma, period and questions to mark a brief pause.

Here we can note that, however, producing an effect of musicality is difficult, even if it does not lack rhythm, due to the difference in the length of each verse and the absence of rhyme.

4 - Metric

The meter represents the main rhythmic structure of a verse in poetry. Thus, many forms of verse poetry, especially some traditional ones, have a pre-established metric structure.

The meter refers to the number of syllables a verse has, and in freer forms of poetry, there may still be a kind of meter, which could be determined by rhythm.

The following is the poem A un gato, by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges:

In this poem, making an analysis of each verse, we can see that each of the verses is made up of 11 syllables.

However, it should be noted that some syllables, which actually represent two different syllables, are joined, counting as one.

In the fifth verse "By indecipherable work of a decree", there are 13 syllables, of which the syllables bra and in in "indecipherable work" are taken as one because a work ends in a vowel and indecipherable begins in a vowel, that is,, there is the presence of a diphthong.

In the same verse, the syllables "de" and "un" are taken as a single syllable using the same criteria, due to the presence of the diphthong.

Likewise, in the verse “caress of my hand. You have admitted ”, the syllables“ no ”and“ Has ”in“… hand. You have admitted… ”despite the point, they are taken as a single syllable by the presence of the H, which does not represent any sound.

5 - Rhyme

Rhyme is the repetition of the same or similar sounds in two or more words. In poetry, and also in songs, rhyme is taken into account in the final syllable, or in the last syllables, of two verses, which can be followed or separated.

The following is the poem From a rope reflection, by the Mexican poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz:

The first thing that can be identified in this poem is that its structure is that of a sonnet, due to the number of verses and stanzas, in this case, two stanzas of four lines, and two stanzas of three lines. Rhyme is a feature present in sonnets.

In this way we can determine that the rhymes in the first stanza are: wounded and grown, the two represent the last words of the first and last verse of the fourth stanza.

Likewise, in the same stanza, the words "added" and "ponderaba" form the other rhyme of the stanza.

In the last two stanzas they form rhymes: "shot" and "sigh" of the first and third lines of the third stanza, "painful" and prodigious "of the second verse of the third stanza and the first of the last," sigh "and" I admire "in the last verse of the third stanza and the second of the last, and" prodigious "and" happy "in the first and third verse of the last stanza.

In the case of sonnets, this is not a coincidence, being part of their structure. We can see that in the first two stanzas, the rhymes are found between the first and last verse, and the second and third.

And in the last two stanzas, the rhymes are between the first and third verse of each, the second of the third and the first of the last, and the last of the third and second of the last.

6 -

As in most forms of art. Poems usually have a title, that is, a distinctive name, although they may also lack this.

The poem in this sense can be compared to painting, in which its subjective and intimate nature makes it difficult to understand, and the title (if it has) helps to understand it.

The following is a poem by the Peruvian author César Vallejo:

The first thing we can notice is the continuous presence of the word "Absent!", Which dictates the character and purpose of the work.

The title of this poem is in effect Absent, so the title could be a consequence of the text, as the opposite could happen, of first choosing a title, and then developing the text.

The following is a poem by the Spanish author Federico García Lorca:

Without knowing the title of the work, the range of possibilities to interpret it is extremely wide, but knowing that its title is Desire, we can limit ourselves to thinking that all the apparently beautiful things that Lorca names, are longings of his being..

Characteristics of a poem

1 - They do not present a direct narrative

Poetry is separated from narrative (novels, stories), among other reasons, because the purpose of this is not to narrate events or tell a story, at least not in the form of a narrative. That is, the poem can tell a story, but making use of its own elements.

Thus, the author could decide to tell a story through a poem, but this will not be transmitted to the reader directly, telling the events, linearly or not, as they would in the genres of the narrative.

The message is transmitted through the verses, using elements of the story, such as the location, the time, or the characters.

2 - The poem evokes emotions of the author

Although there is no single subject imposed on poetry, and the poet is free to write on any subject, poetry is an art highly linked to the emotions, feelings and intellect of the person who writes it.

That is to say, regardless of the subject to which it refers (patriotism, love, politics, nature, science), it is difficult to separate the author's own emotions from the text, with various personal reasons (conscious or unconscious) that led to writing of this.

3 - Use literary figures

Being poetry a literary genre different from that of narrative, it requires (like other genres) the use of literary figures, which help to express the ideas, emotions or the story that the author intends to tell.

As it is not written in the usual language with which people express themselves, even in poetic prose, the true message of a poem can be hidden, and it is usually free or open interpretation.

For this purpose, literary figures are used, that is, unconventional ways of using words.

The most notorious case is the use of metaphor, which means the displacement of meaning between two terms with an aesthetic purpose.

This results in a description, often almost visual, that allows the reader to more easily understand the meaning of the text.

An example of a metaphor can be found in Don Quixote: "That his hair is made of gold, his forehead of Elysian fields…"

References

1. Poetry. (2017, June 21). Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Consultation date: 04:18, June 27, 2017 from es.wikipedia.org
2. Poem. (2017, June 23). Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Consultation date: 04:18, June 27, 2017 from es.wikipedia.org
3. Poetry. (2017, June 27). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 04:18, June 27, 2017, from en.wikipedia.org
4. Verse. (2017, June 19). Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Consultation date: 04:18, June 27, 2017 from es.wikipedia.org
5. Metaphor. (2017, June 24). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 04:18, June 27, 2017, from en.wikipedia.org
6. Metrics. (2017, June 19). Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Consultation date: 04:18, June 27, 2017 from es.wikipedia.org
7. Stanza. (2017, June 12). Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Consultation date: 04:18, June 27, 2017 from es.wikipedia.org
8. Verse. (2017, June 19). Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Consultation date: 04:18, June 27, 2017 from es.wikipedia.org
9. Rhythm. (2017, June 22). Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Consultation date: 04:18, June 27, 2017 from es.wikipedia.org
10. Meter (poetry). (2017, June 25). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved
11. Strophe. (2016, March 21). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 04:18, June 27, 2017, from en.wikipedia.org
12. Elements of Poetry. In Lexiconic. Retrieved: 04:21, June 27, 2017, from learn.lexiconic.net.