Pioneers! O Pioneers! - Poetic Structure

Poetic Structure

The poem consists of 26 four-line stanzas; each stanza is made up of one short line, two longer lines, and another short line. Within each shorter line there are two strongly accented syllables or syllable groups. In terms of units, the longer lines are made up of 2 units and the shorter lines made of 1. Each long line contains 4 heavily accented syllables and breaks in half with a caesura, which is usually marked with a comma; each of the halves consists of two heavily accented syllables like each beginning and ending line.

Read more about this topic:  Pioneers! O Pioneers!

Famous quotes containing the words poetic and/or structure:

    “The poetic notion of infinity is far greater than that which is sponsored by any creed.”
    —Joseph Brodsky (b. 1940)

    “Just as a new scientific discovery manifests something that was already latent in the order of nature, and at the same time is logically related to the total structure of the existing science, so the new poem manifests something that was already latent in the order of words.”
    —Northrop Frye (b. 1912)