The GED Language Arts, Reading Exam - Poetry

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oetry is often easy to recognize but not as easy to define. Poems are usually short, and often
rhyme, but not always. The beauty (and, for many, the difficulty) of poetry is its brevity. The writer
has to convey an idea or emotion in a very short space. Because there are so few words in a poem,
every word counts, and poems are often layered with meaning. That’s where a poem gets its power.
One fundamental difference between poetry and prose is structure. Poems, of course, are written in verse. They
are meant to be heard as well as read. The meaning in a poem comes not just from the words, but also from how
the words sound and how they are arranged on the page.
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Types of Poems
While poems are often categorized by structure (e.g., sonnets or ballads), a more fundamental way to classify
poems is by their general purpose. Poems can be emotive, imagistic, narrative, and argumentative. They can also
mourn or celebrate.
An emotive poem has as its goal to capture a mood or emotion and to make readers feel that mood or emo-
tion. On the next page is an untitled poem by the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin.
CHAPTER
Poetry
POETRY SHARES many of the same elements as fiction, but
poetry is a unique genre with its own styles and conventions. This
chapter explains what makes poems different from stories and how to
read and understand poems.
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I have loved you; even now I may confess,
Some embers of my love their fire retain
but do not let it cause you more distress,
I do not want to sadden you again.
Hopeless and tonguetied, yet, I loved you dearly
With pangs the jealous and the timid know;
So tenderly I loved you—so sincerely;
I pray God grant another love you so.

An imagistic poem aims to capture a moment and
help us experience that moment sensually (through our
senses). Here is a powerful two-line imagistic poem by
Ezra Pound:
In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Narrative poems tell stories, while argumentative
poems explore an idea (such as love or valor). Here’s a
poem by Robert Frost that does both:
The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the
one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.
Elegies and odes are two other common types of
poems. An elegy is a poem that laments the loss of some-
one or something. An ode, on the other hand, celebrates
a person, place, thing, or event. Here are a few lines from
John Keats’ (1795–1821) famous poem “Ode on a Gre-
cian Urn”:
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
Word Choice in Poetry
Because of their brevity, poets are especially
careful about word choice. They often rely on
figurative language to convey larger ideas,
allowing images to convey ideas rather than
sentences. Poets will also often use words that
can have multiple meanings or associations.
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Elements of Sound
Though not all poems use rhyme, this is the most recog-
nized element of sound in poetry. A rhyme is the repeti-
tion of identical or similar stressed sounds at the end of
a word. Rhymes create rhythm and suggest a relationship
between the rhymed words.
There are several different types of rhymes:
■

Exact rhymes share the same last syllables (the
last consonant and vowel combination). For
example:
cat, hat
laugh, staff
refine, divine
■
Half-rhymes share only the final consonant(s)
cat, hot
adamant, government
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POETRY
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■
Eye rhymes look like a rhyme because the word
endings are spelled the same, but the words don’t
sound the same
bough, through
enough, though
Alliteration is another important element of sound,
and one that is often used in prose as well. Alliteration is
the repetition of sounds. The sound is most often found
at the beginning of words but can also be found
throughout words. For example, the words pitter patter
use alliteration at the beginning (repetition of the p
sound), in the middle (repetition of the t sound), and at
the end (repetition of the r sound). Notice the allitera-
tion of the k sound in the first line and the l sound in the
second line of “The Eagle”:

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Some sounds, such as l, s, r, m, n, and vowel sounds (a,
e, i, o, and u) are soft and create a pleasant, musical effect.
Other sounds, such as b, g, k, and p, are much harder
sounds, less pleasant and more forceful. Writers will use
sound to help create the right tone and reflect the theme
of the poem. By using the k and l sounds together in the
first two lines, Tennyson suggests the duality of the eagle:
its serene beauty and its awesome power.
Onomatopoeia is another element of sound. An ono-
matopoeia is a word that is how it sounds; the sound is
the definition of the word. Buzz, hiss, moan, and screech
are a few examples. These two lines from Robert Frost’s
1916 poem “Out, Out” for example, use onomatopoeia:
And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and
rattled,
As it ran light, or had to bear a load.
Rhythm
One of the most important ways poets establish rhythm
in their poems is through meter. Meter is the number of
syllables in a line and how the stress falls on those sylla-
bles. In iambic meter, one of the most common metrical
patterns, the stress falls on every other syllable, creating
a steady da-dum, da-dum, da-dum rhythm to the poem.
Each “drum beat” (da-dum) is called a foot. Here is
Robert Frost again to demonstrate iambic tetrameter
(four feet per line). Read these lines from “Stopping by
Woods on a Snowy Evening” out loud to hear how the
rhythm works:

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
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Elements of Structure
You won’t find a GED question asking you to identify the
rhyme scheme or meter of a poem, and you won’t be
asked to determine whether a poem is free verse or a son-
net. But knowing these poetic forms and techniques can
help you better understand the poems you read. In
poetry more than any other type of literature, form is
part of the poem’s meaning.
Line Breaks and Stanzas
Because poems are written in verse, poets must decide
how much information belongs on each line and when
those lines should be broken into stanzas (poetic “para-
graphs”). First, it’s important to remember that when
you read a poem out loud, you should pause only when
punctuation tells you to pause. Do not pause at the end
of each line or even at the end of a stanza unless there is
a comma, period, or other punctuation mark that
requires pause. That way, you can hear the flow of the
words as the poet intended.
When you look at a poem, however, you need to take
into consideration the important visual elements of line
breaks and stanzas. Line breaks and stanzas have two
purposes: to call attention to the words at the end of each
line and to set aside each group of words as a distinct
idea. Thus, while poetic sentences sometimes cut across

line breaks and even sometimes stanzas, the visual sepa-
ration of words within those sentences helps poets set off
particular words and ideas for emphasis. Any word at the
end of a line, for example, will stand out. And poets can
space words all across the page, as in the example on the
next page.
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POETRY
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Sleeping
Sleeping, and it was
dark
outside. Inside,
I was
wondering
alone,
wandering
in a dream
of you.
Notice how the spacing here ties the words dark, won-
dering, and wandering together, pairs the words inside
and outside, and sets off alone.
Rhymed and Metered Verse
Poems can be written in rhymed verse, metered (or blank)
verse,or free verse. Rhymed and metered/blank poems
are very confined by their structure; the lines must follow
a rhyme scheme or metrical pattern (or both, if the poem
is both rhymed and metered). Word choice (diction) is
especially controlled by rhyme scheme and metrical pat-

tern. Poets must find words that both convey just the
right idea, have the right ending to fit the rhyme scheme,
and have the right number of syllables and the right
stresses to fit the metrical pattern.
Three common types of rhymed and metered verse
include the sonnet, the ballad, and the villanelle. These
forms all have specific rhyme schemes and metrical pat-
terns that poets must follow. A sonnet, for example, is
composed of fourteen lines usually written in iambic
pentameter (five feet per line). The rhyme scheme will
vary depending on the type of sonnet. An Italian sonnet,
for example, will divide the poem into two stanzas, one
with eight lines, the other with six, using the following
rhyme scheme: abbaabba cdcdcd (or cdecde or cdccdc). A
Shakespearian sonnet, on the other hand, separates the
lines into three quatrains (a quatrain is a stanza of four
lines) and ends with a couplet (a pair of rhyming lines)
with the following rhyme scheme: abab cdcd efef gg.
A ballad is a poem that usually tells a story and is often
meant to be sung. The rhyme scheme is typically abcb
defe ghih, etc. Ballads typically emphasize action rather
than emotions or ideas and often have a steady, sing-
songy meter.
One of the most complex rhyme schemes is the vil-
lanelle. A villanelle has five three-line stanzas with an aba
rhyme scheme and a final quatrain with an abaa rhyme.
There are only two rhymes in the poem, and line one
must be repeated in lines six, twelve, and eighteen, while
line three must be repeated in lines nine, fifteen, and
nineteen.

Blank or metered verse is guided only by meter, not
rhyme. Thus, the lines have a set number of syllables
without any rhyme scheme. A haiku is an example of
blank verse. Haikus are unrhymed poems of three lines
and 17 syllables. Line one has five syllables; line two has
seven; and line three has five. Here is an example:
The Falling Flower
What I thought to be
Flowers soaring to their boughs
Were bright butterflies.
—Moritake (1452–1540)
Free Verse
Free verse is poetry that is free from the restrictions of
meter and rhyme. But that doesn’t mean that free verse
poems are haphazard or simply thrown together. Rather
than fitting a traditional metrical pattern or rhyme
scheme, free verse poems often use a thematic structure
or repetitive pattern. “Sleeping” is one example, setting
off words to isolate some and associate others. A more
structured free verse poem is Kenneth Fearing’s 1941
poem “Ad.” The poem is structured like a help-wanted ad
designed to recruit soldiers for World War II. It begins
like this:
Wanted: Men;
Millions of men are wanted at once in a big new
field
The last line of the poem sums up the compensation
for the soldiers:
Wages: Death.
Thus, the structure of the poem helps reflect its

theme: The absurdity of running an advertisement for
men to kill and be killed, of calling war “a big new field”
to make it sound exciting, reflects the poet’s feelings
about the war—that it, too, is absurd, and that it is
absurd to ask people to kill each other and to die.
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B
efore books and movies, even before language, people were acting out their experiences.
Drama is the oldest form of storytelling and one of the oldest ways of making sense of the human
experience.
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How Drama Is Different
Drama has the same elements of fiction: plot, character, setting, point of view, tone, language and style, symbolism,
and theme. However, drama differs from poetry and prose in a number of significant ways. The most obvious and
important difference is that drama is meant to be performed; it is literature that is designed for a live audience.
(The exception is a small minority of plays called closet dramas, which are plays meant only to be read, not per-
formed.) This makes plays the most immediate and energetic genre of literature, because there is an active
exchange of energy and emotion during the performance.
In drama, action is the driving force of the plot. “The essence of a play is action,” said Aristotle, the first liter-
ary critic of the Western world. Because of the immediacy of a play and the short time span in which the action
must occur, things happen more quickly than they might in a novel. There is less time for digressions; everything
must be related to the unfolding of events on the stage.
CHAPTER
Drama
LIKE FICTION and poetry, drama has its own conventions and
forms. Understanding these conventions and forms can help you
understand the drama excerpts you will find on the GED. This chapter

reviews the elements of drama and strategies for understanding this
genre.
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