Subtitles section Play video
-
Just for a moment,
-
focus on your breath.
-
In slowly.
-
Out slowly.
-
In slowly.
-
Out.
-
The same pattern repeats within every one of us
-
and consider your pulse.
-
The beat is built into the very fabric of our being.
-
Simply put, we're creatures of rhythm and repetition.
-
It's central to our experience,
-
rhythm and repetition,
-
rhythm and repetition.
-
On, and in,
-
and on, and out.
-
And we delight in those aspects everyday,
-
in the rhythm of a song,
-
the beat of the drum,
-
the nod of your head,
-
or in the repetition of soup cans,
-
the rows of an orchard,
-
the artistry of petals.
-
Pattern can be pleasure.
-
In language, rhythm and repetition are often used
-
as the building blocks for poetry.
-
There's the rhythm of language,
-
created by syllables and their emphasis,
-
such as, "So long as men can breathe or eyes can see."
-
And there's the repetition of language at multiple levels:
-
the repetition of letters,
-
"So long lives this and this gives life to thee,"
-
of sounds,
-
"breathe," "see," "thee,"
-
and of words.
-
With so many uses, repetition is one of the poet's most malleable
-
and reliable tools.
-
It can lift or lull the listener,
-
amplify or diminish the line,
-
unify or diversify ideas.
-
In fact, even rhythm itself,
-
a repeated pattern of stressed syllables,
-
is a form of repetition.
-
Yet for all its varied uses,
-
too much repetition can backfire.
-
Imagine writing the same sentence on the blackboard twenty times,
-
again, and again, and again, and again,
-
or imagine a young child clamoring for her mother's attention,
-
"Mom, mom, mommy, mom, mom."
-
Not exactly what we might call poetry.
-
So what is poetic repetition, and why does it work?
-
Possibly most familiar is rhyme,
-
the repetition of like sounds in word endings.
-
As with Shakespeare's example,
-
we often encounter rhyme at the ends of lines.
-
Repetition in this way creates an expectation.
-
We begin to listen for the repetition of those similar sounds.
-
When we hear them, the found pattern is pleasurable.
-
Like finding Waldo in the visual chaos,
-
we hear the echo in the oral chatter.
-
Yet, rhyme need not surface solely at a line's end.
-
Notice the strong "i" sound in,
-
"So long lives this and this gives life to thee."
-
This repetition of vowel sounds is called assonance
-
and can also be heard in Eminem's "Lose Yourself."
-
Notice how the "e" and "o" sounds repeat both within in
-
and at the end of each line:
-
"Oh, there goes gravity,
-
Oh, there goes rabbit, he choked,
-
he so mad but he won't give up that easy,
-
no, he won't have it,
-
he knows his whole back's to these ropes."
-
The alternating assonance creates its own rhythm,
-
and invites us to try our own voices in echoing it.
-
Similarly, consonance is the repetition of like consonant sounds,
-
such as the "l" and "th" in,
-
"So long lives this and this gives life to thee."
-
In fact, this type of specific consonance,
-
which occurs at the beginning of words
-
may be familiar to you already.
-
It's called alliteration, or front rhyme.
-
Great examples include tongue twisters.
-
Betty bought some butter but the butter was bitter
-
so Betty bought some better butter to make the bitter butter better.
-
Here, the pleasure in pattern is apparent as we trip over the consonance
-
both within words and at their start.
-
Yet tongue twisters also reflect the need for variation in poetic repetition.
-
While challenging to say,
-
they're seen by some as lesser imitations of poetry,
-
or gimmicky because they hammer so heavily on the same sounds,
-
closer to that blackboard-style of repetition.
-
Ultimately, this is the poet's balancing act,
-
learning when to repeat
-
and when to riff,
-
when to satisfy expectations,
-
and when to thwart them,
-
and in that balance, it may be enough to remember
-
we all live in a world of wild variation
-
and carry with us our own breath and beat,
-
our own repetition wherever we go.