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The Weight of Words [1]

Poetry [2]
12.17.24

“I caught this morning morning’s minion, king- / dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding / Of the rolling level underneath him steady air,” begins Gerard Manley Hopkins’s 1877 poem “The Windhover,” a sonnet in which the poet wields the image of a kestrel in flight to explore his conflicted feelings about spirituality and art. The beginning lines of the poem are filled with repetition—of words, alliteration, consonance, and assonance—all of which place a weight onto the words, slowing the pace as one reads it aloud. Try your hand at weighing down the beginning of a new poem with repetition, using a variety of rhymes and sound. After a leisure beginning, does your poem suddenly break free and open, or is it more gradual?


Source URL:https://www.pw.org/content/the_weight_of_words_0

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[1] https://www.pw.org/content/the_weight_of_words_0 [2] https://www.pw.org/genre/poetry