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[Flying Dice]

Check it. Right there in the first, even.

From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty's rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory:
But thou contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed'st thy light's flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thy self thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel:
Thou that art now the world's fresh ornament,
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content,
And tender churl mak'st waste in niggarding:
Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world's due, by the grave and thee.

That's the beauty of iambic pentameter: pentameter is long enough to allow complex expressions, but short enough to forestall stuff that would run into trouble, aided by it only being disyllabic. You had to go to ten trochees to try to make that point. You might have a point if we were trying for something dumb like accentual-syllabic verse taken to an extreme (say, a tetrasyllabic octometer or such nonsense).

[heydude6]

Does anyone know any good sonnets in modern English?

[scriver]

I hear translated Shakespeare is pretty good.p

[Silverthrone]

Today's WTF:

I've been catching up on Sabaton's latest, listening to the goodies on Youtube. By the by, it's amazing, glorious and I love it. It's just the sort of thing I like. _{It's so gooood... Never thought I was the type that could like music this much. Herre min skapare...} I'll be gettin' myself some of that, when I've got the money to spare.

However, I looked at the video thingie for The Lost Battalion, and realised the background slides looked awfully familiar. And then the penny dropped.

"Heeeey, isn't this Men of War?!" It is! And more to the point, it's WW2-era starring vodka guzzlers and sausage gobblers. I mean, the background slides are very nicely done, but... Dear me, can't unsee it, nor unhear "AIM IS IN THE REACH ZONE!" in the background. It's kind of like that documentary that used footage from ArmA 2 and said it was a real life firefight involving the IRA.

It's still a good song, of course, and it doesn't really bother me. The slides are just background, and they look pretty damn good. Plus, Men of War is awesome, can't complain. I think it's a pretty funny coincidence, though. And I like to think some of the dudes going SHOOT AS I SAY FOUR in the background.

Edit: heeeeeey, there's some Company of Heroes assets in there, too! Someone on Nuclear Blast got very long fingers, haven't they?

[Solifuge]

Does anyone know any good sonnets in modern English?

The one quoted in my Sig is one of my favorites.

[Kot]

TFW all this fucking poetry stuff doesn't make a single piece of sense to me because Polish language is so snowflakey that we apparently don't obide by the same rules as everyone else.
That or English is the cucked language.

However, I looked at the video thingie for The Lost Battalion, and realised the background slides looked awfully familiar. And then the penny dropped.

"Heeeey, isn't this Men of War?!" It is! And more to the point, it's WW2-era starring vodka guzzlers and sausage gobblers. I mean, the background slides are very nicely done, but... Dear me, can't unsee it, nor unhear "AIM IS IN THE REACH ZONE!" in the background. It's kind of like that documentary that used footage from ArmA 2 and said it was a real life firefight involving the IRA.

Yeah, I remember noticing that. The breakthrough for me was the sight of a MG gunner back - I have stared at that shit whilist Blitzkrieging too much, so for me it was more "FEUER AUF MEIN KOMMANDO!", "SPRENGGRANATE LADEN!" or "SHEIßE, MEIN BEIN!" I was only made sure by the sight of Russian PTRD gunner with a fucking broom on his back while carrying PPSH in hands. Only Men Of War has it this ridiculous.

[pisskop]

Post some polish poetry.  We must see this example.

Poetry is what people do when they arent getting bashed by the Russians or nommed by the Germans, fyi

[Kot]

Poetry is what people do when they arent getting bashed by the Russians or nommed by the Germans, fyi

... so... conquering Moscow and being the most powerful country in the Europe while Germany is shattered into hundreds of shitty city-states?

[hector13]

Nie mój cyrk, nie moje małpy. Beautiful.

[pisskop]

Poetry is what people do when they arent getting bashed by the Russians or nommed by the Germans, fyi

... so... conquering Moscow and being the most powerful country in the Europe while Germany is shattered into hundreds of shitty city-states?

shhh, no tears, only poetry.  but that is like my Crusader Kings II playthroughs.  I feel less special knowing it was manifest destiny.

[Sergarr]

hey it's no joke, that was probably the closest Russia got to being subjugated by another state after the Mongol invasion

[pisskop]

It was, and a lot of people tried.

[Frumple]

TFW all this fucking poetry stuff doesn't make a single piece of sense to me because Polish language is so snowflakey that we apparently don't obide by the same rules as everyone else.
That or English is the cucked language.

It's more like all the other languages are, really.

[Flying Dice]

Most English poetry is pretty simple to understand once you know the language used to discuss it.

Take iambic pentameter, one of those cases where the name is a literal descriptor of the form.

Iamb: A metrical foot consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable.

Foot: In this context, a set of syllables arranged according to a predetermined pattern. An iamb is one; a trochee is the reverse of an iamb (a stressed-unstressed pair). There's a fancy name for each possible combination of stressed and unstressed syllables. This is used for English-language verse which fixes the number of syllables and stresses (accentual-syllabic), and for quantitative meter (which doesn't matter unless you're studying Classical poetry, you poor bastard).

Pentameter: The meter in which each line has five feet.


Even outside that, English poetry often tends to be prescribed in form - take, say, the villanelle: you might have no goddamn clue how to write one, and there's actually a fair degree of specificity, but once you've learned it it's simple. Five tercets and a quatrain, plus some pairs of repeated lines. Like most, there's a famous example to study.

But yeah. English poetry is mostly just knowing the language used to discuss it and memorizing the arrangement of specific forms. The real complexity comes in having the proper artistic sense to know when and how it's appropriate to deviate from the form; very few great poets rigorously obeyed the tenets of whatever form or meter they worked in for every single piece. Older stuff, particularly from the pre-industrial British Isles, tends to work well both read and spoken, since it was often traded around and passed on orally--there's some interesting history to be found about that, stuff like how poets would sometimes disseminate work by reading it at inns and such, where travelers would record and retell it as they traveled.

Grain of salt of course, it's been years since I read and wrote about this.

As for unrhymed free-verse, that barely even counts as poetry, don't pay attention to it.

[pisskop]

So I was serious about posting some polish poetry.  Im curious to see it.