General Chat

I have always preferred to read poems that rhyme. and, of the few times I have attempted it, preferred to write those that rhyme as well.

lolol oh yes

"Always be on time for work,
Neat and pressed, and never shirk."

would have gone down well with several former co-workers of mine :-) We had a few posters in the staff room of that ilk. :-)

I will read the link after tea :-)

I have nothing against rhyming poetry!

It's just the monotonous form of Tolkien's. It just drones.

Even iambic pentameter à la Will Shakespeare doesn't have that effect. :-)

There's just something about iambec tetrameter ... ow.

(I had to look that one up!)

For you:

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/19634/is-it-true-that-iambic-pentameter-is-natural-to-english-if-so-why

:-D


I was once assigned the task of translating into English the staff guidelines for a fancy French restaurant. As the above link notes re Italian, it can be easier to form rhyming couplets in French than in English, since it's easier to stick a verb at the end of a line and because of standard infinitive forms in French, it's easy to find a rhyming pair. Sticking the verb at the end in English can make it easier to find rhymes, but is generally contrived.

I couldn't bring myself to just do a literal translation, which would have no rhyme at all, so I pored over the dozen or so stanzas and managed to come up with a very fine bit of verse of my own to convey everything in the original, all crammed into the same number of lines, in the right order. I actually got a formal thank-you (handwritten on a note card) from the person who had requested the work.

The only bit I remember now -- in iambic tetrameter; Tolkien would have been proud -- was this:

Always be on time for work,
Neat and pressed, and never shirk.

If I had been a staff member, I would have gagged on reading the thing and quit. :-D

Nice to see you too!

I think sadly that rhyming poetry is perceived as 'too easy', and I don't think that's so. Whereas anyone can string a few sentences together and call them a 'poem' when really it is only prose without the full stops, and sometimes prosaic prose at that ;-)

lolol

PS Nice to see you posting :-)

I love it lol, give me a poem that rhymes any time ;-) :-D

Aaaaargh! The "poetry" was the thing that turned me off all those hobbits the most. :-D

I once got an entire volume of Tolkien's doggerel for Christmas, when my mum consulted a knowledgeable bookstore clerk (they used to exist) about what on earth I might want to read next. I started thinking in

da DA da DA da DA da DA

cadence.

Yeeps. That was just about exactly 40 years ago.

"Roads go ever ever on,
Over rock and under tree,
By caves where never sun has shone,
By streams that never find the sea;
Over snow by winter sown,
And through the merry flowers of June,
Over grass and over stone,
And under mountains of the moon.

Roads go ever ever on
Under cloud and under star,
Yet feet that wandering have gone
Turn at last to home afar.
Eyes that fire and sword have seen
And horror in the halls of stone
Look at last on meadows green
And trees and hills they long have known"

Tolkien

80 years ago today "The Hobbit" was published %3A-D