Happy Great Poetry Reading Day

Today is National Great Poetry Reading Day. 

This is a day to celebrate great poetry and the great poets that wrote them.  Thank you to my pal, Ranger the Scottie, for letting me know about this perfect little holiday!

You can take part in celebrating National Great Poetry Day by reading poetry, listening to poetry or writing your own poetry.  If you are reading or listening to poetry, you can look (or listen) for characteristics which can help lead you to the meaning of the poem.  Some of those characteristics are:

Figurative Language

• Metaphor - describing one thing as if it were something else.  (My house was a zoo this morning.)
• Simile - using like or as to compare two seemingly unlike things.  (Ma stormed around the house like a tornado.)
• Personification - giving human qualities to something that is not human.  (The wind howled its objection.)
• Symbol - anything that represents something else.

Sensory Language

Descriptive words and phrases that appeal to the five senses to create strong images.

Sound Devices

Alliteration - repetition of consonant sounds. (slippery slope)

Onomatopoeia - use of words that imitate sounds.  (hiss, bark, crash)

Meter - the rhythmical pattern (accented/unaccented syllables) in a poem.

One of my favorite poems that uses a lot of the characteristics above is

Nothing Gold Can Stay

by Robert Frost  

Nature's first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf's a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief;

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

To me, "Nothing Gold Can Stay" is a great poem!  

Do you have a favorite poem?  What is it and why is it your favorite?

Poetry Notes:

"Nothing Gold Can Stay" is a poem by Robert Frost written in 1923 and published in the Yale Review in October of that year.  It was later published in the collection New Hampshire (1923; copyright renewed 1951) that earned Frost the 1924 Pulitzer Prize.

"Nothing Gold Can Stay" falls into the public domain - the legal and moral space in which intellectual and artistic material is no longer considered privately, but rather collectively owned (lifetime of the artist plus 70 years): a common social resource, free to be reprinted and transmitted without limitation or constraint.