Rhetorical Forms 1

Definition:

• A complaint poem is "a poem of lament" often about a past lover or directed towards social injustice and immorality. The Jeremiad follows the same themes, but is typically in prose. 

  • Sources: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/education/glossary/complaint, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremiad 

History:

• The word is named after the biblical prophet Jeremiah. The Book of Jeremiah chronicles the downfall of the Kingdom of Judah, and asserts that this is because its rulers have broken the covenant with the Lord. The jeremiad was later used by the Puritans in prominent early evangelical sermons like "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" by Jonathan Edwards. Besides Jonathan Edwards, such jeremiads can be found in every era of American history, including John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Fenimore Cooper.

  • Source: 

My Response:

• I

What is this poetic element like?

• This 

Example:

Lamentations 1:1-4

1 How deserted lies the city,

    once so full of people!

How like a widow is she,

    who once was great among the nations!

She who was queen among the provinces

    has now become a slave.

2 Bitterly she weeps at night,

    tears are on her cheeks.

Among all her lovers

    there is no one to comfort her.

All her friends have betrayed her;

    they have become her enemies.

3 After affliction and harsh labor,

    Judah has gone into exile.

She dwells among the nations;

    she finds no resting place.

All who pursue her have overtaken her

    in the midst of her distress.

4 The roads to Zion mourn,

    for no one comes to her appointed festivals.

All her gateways are desolate,

    her priests groan,

her young women grieve,

    and she is in bitter anguish.

Definition:

• An eclogue is a short poem, usually written as a dialogue or monologue among shepherds, that presents pastoral scenes while often using allegory to comment on politics, love, or poetry. The form was shaped by Virgil’s Eclogues, which combined pastoral imagery with deeper symbolic meaning and helped establish the pastoral genre in Western literature.

  • Source: The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics : Fourth Edition

History:

• The eclogue roots all the way back to 70 BC with Virgil's Eclogues, and was later replicated in Britain in the 15th century. Furthermore, there has been some variety on this through parodies on the pastoral genre, which happened by the 18th century.

  • Source: Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eclogue

My Response:

• It feels calm, reflective, religious, and philosophical. I like how they use pastoral storytelling to explore big themes like politics, love, and morality. There's simplicity to it, but it's rich and reveals complex ideas.

What is this poetic element like?

• This honestly just feels like dialogues from scripture or philosophical texts. Like a slightly altered version of God and Moses having a dialogue, or a Socratic dialogue, having simple and established characters talking about major, big-picture ideas. 

Example:

Eclogue I: The Dialogue of Meliboeus and Tityrus by Virgil (1 of the 10 Eclogues)

MeliboeusTityrus, lying there, under the spreading beech-tree cover,

you study the woodland Muse, on slender shepherd’s pipe.

We are leaving the sweet fields and the frontiers of our country:

we are fleeing our country: you, Tityrus, idling in the shade,

teach the woods to echo ‘lovely Amaryllis’.

TityrusO Meliboeus, a god has created this leisure for us.

Since he’ll always be a god to me, a gentle lamb

from our fold will often drench his altar.

Through him my cattle roam as you see, and I

allow what I wish to be played by my rural reed.

MeliboeusWell I don’t begrudge you: rather I wonder at it: there’s such

endless trouble everywhere over all the countryside. See,

I drive my goats, sadly: this one, Tityrus, I can barely lead.

Here in the dense hazels, just now, she birthed twins,

the hope of the flock, alas, on the bare stones.

I’d have often recalled that this evil was prophesied to me,

by the oak struck by lightning, if my mind had not been dulled.

But, Tityrus, tell me then, who is this god of yours?

TityrusMeliboeus, foolishly, I thought the City they call Rome

was like ours, to which we shepherds are often accustomed

to drive the tender young lambs of our flocks.

So I considered pups like dogs, kids like their mothers,

so I used to compare the great with the small.

But this city indeed has lifted her head as high among others,

as cypress trees are accustomed to do among the weeping willows.

MeliboeusAnd what was the great occasion for you setting eyes on Rome?

TityrusLiberty, that gazed on me, though late, in my idleness,

when the hairs of my beard fell whiter when they were cut,

gazed yet, and came to me after so long a time,

when Amaryllis was here, and Galatea had left me.

Since, while Galatea swayed me, I confess,

there was never a hope of freedom, or thought of saving.

My hand never came home filled with coins,

though many a victim left my sheepfolds,

and many a rich cheese was pressed for the ungrateful town.

MeliboeusAmaryllis, I wondered why you called on the gods so mournfully,

and for whom you left the apples there on the trees:

Tityrus was absent: Tityrus, here, the very pines,

the very springs and orchards were calling out for you.

TityrusWhat could I do? I could not be rid of my bondage

elsewhere, or find gods so ready to help me.

There, Meliboeus, I saw that youth for whom

our altars smoke for six days twice a year.

There he was first to reply to my request:

‘Slave, go feed you cattle as before: rear your bulls.’

MeliboeusFortunate old man, so these lands will remain yours.

And they’re wide enough for you: though bare stone,

and pools with muddy reeds cover all your pastures.

No strange plants will tempt your pregnant ewes,

no contagious disease from a neighbour’s flock will harm them.

Fortunate old man, here you’ll find the cooling shade,

among familiar streams and sacred springs.

Here, as always, on your neighbour’s boundary, the hedge,

its willow blossoms sipped by Hybla’s bees,

will often lull you into sleep with the low buzzing:

there, under the high cliff, the woodsman sings to the breeze:

while the loud wood-pigeons, and the doves,

your delight, will not cease their moaning from the tall elm.

TityrusSo the swift deer will sooner feed on air,

and the seas leave the fish naked on shore,

or the Parthian drink the Saône, the German the Tigris,

both in exile wandering each other’s frontiers,

than that gaze of his will fade from my mind.

MeliboeusBut we must go, some to the parched Africans,

some to find Scythia, and Crete’s swift Oaxes,

and the Britons wholly separated from all the world.

Ah, will I gaze on my country’s shores, after long years,

and my poor cottage, its roof thatched with turf,

and gazing at a few ears of corn, see my domain?

An impious soldier will own these well-tilled fields,

a barbarian these crops. See to what war has led

our unlucky citizens: for this we sowed our lands.

Now graft your pears, Meliboeus, plant your rows of vines.

Away with you my once happy flock of goats.

Lying in some green hollow, I’ll no longer see you

clinging far off to some thorn-filled crag:

I’ll sing no songs: no longer grazed by me, my goats,

will you chew the flowering clover and the bitter willows.

TityrusYet you might have rested here with me tonight

on green leaves: we have ripe apples,

soft chestnuts, and a wealth of firm cheeses:

and now the distant cottage roofs show smoke

and longer shadows fall from the high hills.

Definition: A palinode or palinody is an ode in which the writer retracts a view or sentiment expressed in an earlier poem. 

Source: Palinode - Wikipedia 

History: The first recorded use of a palinode is in a poem by Stesichorus in the 7th century BC, in which he retracts his earlier statement that the Trojan War was all the fault of Helen. 

Source: Palinode - Wikipedia 

My Response: I think the entire subject of this a palinode is great. I think there is a bit of humor in this definition because it basically is an author talking shit about someone else's work, using their own writing. Or it can even be about their own work later on in their life such as the example below.

What is this poetic element like? It's an ode and not like anything else; it's honestly its own thing. It's just a varient of an ode.

Example: 

Chaucer's Retraction is one example of a palinode.

In 1895, Gelett Burgess wrote his famous poem, the Purple Cow:

I never saw a purple cow.

I never hope to see one.

But I can tell you anyhow

I'd rather see than be one.

Later in his life, he followed it with this palinode:

Ah yes, I wrote the purple cow!

I’m sorry now I wrote it!

But I can tell you anyhow,

I’ll kill you if you quote it!

Source:Palinode - Wikipedia 

Definition:

• Pastoral is both a genre of literature, and or music and a work from the genre pastoral, just like eclogues. It depicts an idealised form of the shepherd's lifestyle – a poem that retreats from the trappings of modernity to the imagined virtues and romance of nature and rural life. The target audience is typically an urban one. A pastoral is a work of this genre. The genre is also known as bucolic, from the Greek βουκολικόν, from βουκόλος, meaning a cowherd. (Wikipedia and The Poetry Foundation)

History:

• The first accounts come from Theocritus (3 BCE) who wrote idealized accounts of shepherds and their loves living simple lives. Much later on, this pastoral tradition was used as an escape to modernity. “The pastoral poem faded after the European Industrial Revolution of the 18th century, but its themes persist in poems that romanticize rural life or reappraise the natural world”. (The Poetry Foundation)

My Response:

• Pastoral can be a way of romanticizing a hard working and not well paid life. Romanticization is a powerful tool. It can connect us to a story, activate our senses and emotions, and help us learn. But it can also be misused: to make something hard, laborious, or constrained look beautiful and natural, serving an agenda that essentialize a race or a gender through a disgusting determinism — the beauty of war, the stay-at-home wife "born to cook and make children", life in the slums, etc...

What is this poetic element like? (metaphor ou simile)

• Pastoral is like putting a nice filter on a picture to remove all the pimples and make you look more muscular, more pretty, with a sharper chin or less hairy nose. However,, there is already beauty in pastoral life.   

Examples: 

A Sylvan Scene (II.)

By Theocritus

They spying on a mountain wild

Wood of various kinds of trees,

Found under a smooth rock

A perennial spring,

Filled with clear water,

And the pebbles below shone like crystal

Or silver from the depths;

Near the spot had grown tall pines,

Poplars, plane trees, cypresses

With leafy tops, and odorous flowers,

Pleasant work for hairy bees,

Flowers as many as bloom in the meads

When spring is ending.

Pastoral

By Jennifer Chang

Something in the field is

working away. Root-noise.

Twig-noise. Plant

of weak chlorophyll, no

name for it. Something

in the field has mastered

distance by living too close

to fences. Yellow fruit, has it

pit or seeds? Stalk of wither. Grass-

noise fighting weed-noise. Dirt

and chant. Something in the

field. Coreopsis. I did not mean

to say that. Yellow petal, has it

wither-gift? Has it gorgeous

rash? Leaf-loss and worried

sprout, its bursting art. Some-

thing in the. Field fallowed and

cicada. I did not mean to

say. Has it roar and bloom?

Has it road and follow? A thistle

prick, fraught burrs, such

easy attachment. Stem-

and stamen-noise. Can I lime-

flower? Can I chamomile?

Something in the field cannot.

(Notice how this poem plays on pastoral poetry but deliberately tries to resist the theme as well. The persona shows us about the beauty of an unfiltered picture and makes us listen to the raw sound of the field. They are interested in imperfect things.)

Definition:
A praise poem is a poetic form that celebrates, honors, or exalts a person, community, object, or concept, often highlighting qualities such as strength, beauty, virtue, or significance. Praise poems may be formal or informal and often rely on repetition, vivid imagery, epithets, and elevated language. According to The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, praise poetry is frequently performative and communal, functioning as a social act of recognition and affirmation.

History:
Praise poetry has deep roots in oral traditions across many cultures, especially in African literary traditions such as Zulu izibongo, where poets publicly celebrate leaders, ancestors, and warriors. These poems were often performed aloud, emphasizing rhythm, repetition, and audience engagement. In Anglophone poetry, praise forms appear in odes and celebratory verse, from classical antiquity to modern times. Contemporary poets have expanded the tradition to include praise for everyday people and objects. Institutions like the Academy of American Poets and the Poetry Foundation highlight the continued importance of praise poetry, particularly in works like Odes to Common Things by Pablo Neruda, which elevates ordinary objects through poetic attention.

My Response:
I find praise poems meaningful because they intentionally focus on what is good, valuable, or worthy of recognition. In a lot of literature, conflict or suffering takes center stage, but praise poetry shifts the focus to appreciation. It feels almost like an act of gratitude or worship, depending on the subject. I think this makes the form powerful, especially when it honors things that might otherwise go unnoticed. They can be grateful about certain things too.

What is this poetic element like?
Praise poetry is often compared to the ode, since both celebrate their subjects. However, while odes are typically more structured and formal in Western traditions, praise poems can be more flexible, especially in oral or cultural contexts. As noted in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, praise poetry often emphasizes performance, repetition, and communal identity, distinguishing it from more solitary, written lyric forms.

Example:

From Pablo Neruda, “Ode to My Socks” (translation):

Oh how beautiful they are,
my feet feel honored
by these heavenly
socks.