From my notes for a class I taught on Shakespeare to our homeschool group a few years ago. Maybe some of you can use is for a poetry lesson with your children:

One of the reasons we study Shakespeare is because of the enormous contributions he made to our language. We unwittingly use many expressions which he coined, such as “you’ll eat us out of house and home,” taken from Henry IV, Part 2, “the world’s your oyster,” from The Merry Wives of Windsor and “there’s a method in my madness,” from Hamlet. He was so masterful with the use of the English language that he was able to play with words. He even made up many new words such as leapfrog, submerged, countless, dwindle and lonely.

Believe it or not, poetry was once written to make difficult subjects more understandable. It is only in modern times that poetry has gained the reputation for being esoteric and unreachable. Shakespeare wrote in Sonnet 55 that “not marble, nor the gilded monuments/ of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme.” Poetry is a way of making one’s thoughts and feelings immortal this side of eternity.

Shakespeare was not only a great playwright, he was a poet. His most famous poems are his sonnets. He probably started writing these poems sometime from 1592 to 1594, when the theatres were closed because of the plague in London. Most of the actors as well as the wealthy citizens had fled London for what they thought was the cleaner and healthier air of the countryside.

Sonnets were first invented by Italian poets. Sonnets were very popular in the 16th century, but English poets had a more difficult time writing good sonnets because they had to figure out how to make them rhyme. Italian, you see, ends every word with a vowel which makes it easy to find rhymes (I just told Steve about Italian words and he said, “Neato.”)

There are three major categories of poems: those that rhyme, those in blank verse and those in free verse. Rhyming poems follow many rhyming patterns and they have a certain meter. Blank verse is unrhymed but also has a meter. Shakespeare’s plays are written in blank verse. Free verse does not necessarily rhyme and follows no particular pattern.

Shakespeare’s plays do not generally rhyme unless someone is giving a flowery speech or says a couplet (two consecutive lines which rhyme) at the end of a scene. But they often have a pattern in the way the lines are written. This pattern is called iambic pentameter. Each line has a 5-beat pattern: dah-Dum, dah-dum, dah-Dum, dah-Dum, dah-Dum. The sonnets follow this pattern, but they also rhyme.

Here are some literary devices used in poetry with their definitions. I will also link to some of my favorite poems and tell you what literary devices to look for in them:

Allegory: Tells a story that has both literal and figurative meanings, an extended metaphor.

Alliteration: The repetition of consonant sounds, usually at the beginning of words.

Consonance: The repetition of consonants (often hard consonants) within words that are close together.

Couplet: A complete thought written in two lines which rhyme.

Imagery: Description which evokes vivid pictures in the reader’s mind.

Metaphor: Figurative language when something is described as being something it really isn’t, for the sake of comparision, to create an image.

Parallelism: This is used in Hebrew poetry, such as the Psalms. It is the repetition of meaning, saying similar things twice, in different ways or with a different emphasis.

Personification: Giving animals, ideas or inanimate objects human characteristics.

Repetition: Using the same word several times, for emphasis or effect.

Simile: Figurative language comparing two dissimilar objects using the words “like” or “as.”

Find these literary devices in these poems:

• Psalm 73: 21-26 (parallelism)
• Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29 (simile, personification, couplet)
• Death Be Not Proud by John Donne (personification)
• A Wreath by George Herbert (metaphor)
• From Ode: Intimations of Immortality (lines 59-77) by William Wordsworth (consonance, alliteration)
• God’s Grandeur by Gerard Manley Hopkins (alliteration)
• Up-Hill by Christina Rossetti (imagery)
• The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost (allegory)
• Little Gidding V, Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot (allegory, imagery, repetition)

That didn’t hurt too badly, now, did it? Not as bad as a trip to the dentist for a root canal!