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Narrative poetry, or poetic narrative, is a form of literature in which a story is told in a text written in verse. Like a novel or a short story, the poetic narrative has a plot and characters, as well as a setting, displays actions and dialogues, but using the literary techniques of poetry, that is, rhyme and meter. In many cases, in the poetic narrative the text runs through the story of the same person, the narrator. This is the case of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven , a text narrated by an afflicted man who, over 18 stanzas, describes his relationship with a raven and how he plunges into despair.
The origins of poetic narrative
The oldest records of poetic expressions account for their oral transmission: poems recited, sung or simply told. The literary devices of poetry, rhyme, and meter made stories that were transmitted orally easier to memorize and thus endure over time or travel long distances. This is how narrative poetry developed from the oral tradition. And narrative poetry contributed to the development that other literary forms, such as two transcendent works of ancient Greece such as The Iliad and The Odyssey , have inspired artists and writers to this day.
Narrative poetry became a literary form that was expressed through epic poems that in the Western world have endured over time. Written in Old French, Chansons de geste , A Song of Deed , galvanized the literary activity of medieval Europe. Of Germanic origin, the Nibelungenlied , The Song of the Nibelungs , is perpetuated in time in Richard Wagner’s opera Der Ring des Nibelungen , The Ring of the Nibelungs . In the Anglo-Saxon tradition, the epic poem Boewulf stands out , which has inspired books, films and even computer games.
A work of poetic narrative of great importance in Western culture is The Divine Comedy , written by Dante Alighieri at the beginning of the 14th century. In the East, in India, two remarkable texts were written in Sanskrit; the Mahabharata , the longest poem ever written, with more than 100,000 verses, and the everlasting Ramayana , which spreads Hindu culture and thought in Asia, influencing its literature, various artistic expressions, and even architecture.
poetic narrative
The poetic narrative is one of the three categories of poetry, along with dramatic and lyrical poetry. Each of these three categories has distinctive characteristics. While lyric poems emphasize expressiveness, narrative poems emphasize plot. Dramatic poetry, as in the works of William Shakespeare, written in verse, are extensive plays, with numerous actors. However, the distinction between genres can blur to the extent that poets develop narrative poetry in lyrical language. Similarly, a narrative poem can take the form of dramatic poetry when the poet incorporates more than one narrator into the work. The defining characteristic of a narrative poem is the development of a story.
Different forms of poetic narrative
Ancient and medieval poetic narrative used to be epic; Written in a bombastic style, the epic narrative poems recounted legends of virtuous heroes and mighty gods. Other traditional forms of poetic narrative include romances, poems about knights and stories of chivalry, and ballads, poems about love and heartbreak, and dramatic events.
Yet narrative poetry is a constantly evolving literary form, and there are countless ways to tell stories with verse. Four examples of poetic narrative that illustrate various approaches to this literary form are described below.
Hiawatha’s Song
In The Song of Hiawatha , American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807 – 1882) narrates North American native legends, in metrical verse imitating the Finnish national epic The Kalevala . In turn, The Kalevala picks up the style of the previous poetic narrative, from The Iliad , Beowulf and The Song of the Nibelungs . Henry Longfellow’s sprawling poem has all the makings of classic epic poetry: a noble hero, doomed love, gods, magic, and folklore. Despite its sentimentality and cultural stereotypes, Hiawatha’s Songit suggests the haunting rhythms of North American native chants and unfolds a uniquely North American mythology.
idylls of the king
The idyll is a narrative form that originated in ancient Greece, but the idyll written by Alfred Tennyson (1809 – 1892), Idylls of the King , is a romance based on English legends. Through twelve poems Alfred Tennyson tells the story of King Arthur, his knights and his tragic love for Guinevere. The extensive work takes records of medieval legends compiled by Thomas Malory (1416 – 1471).
I would gladly follow love, if that could be .
I need to follow death, which calls me .
Call and I’ll follow you, I’ll follow you! Let me die.
Writing about chivalry and courtly love, Tennyson made an allegory about the behaviors of the Victorian society in which he lived. Idylls of the King takes the description of the social environment to narrative poetry.
The Ballad of the Weaver’s Harp
The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver , by Edna St. Vincent Millay, tells the story of a mother’s unconditional love.
Son, said my mother,
when I was knee high,
you need clothes that cover you,
and I don’t even have a rag
There is nothing in the house
to make boy’s pants,
nor scissors to cut the fabric,
no thread to sew.
The poem, narrated by the son watching his mother’s sacrifice, culminates when the woman dies weaving imaginary clothing on her magic harp.
American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) wrote the story as a ballad, a literary form that grew out of traditional folk music. The poem’s iambic meter and predictable rhyme create a singing rhythm that suggests childlike innocence.
The Ballad of the Weaver Harp is a soulful and haunting song when heard sung by country musician Johnny Cash. The narrative poem can be interpreted as a simple story about poverty, or as a complex message about the sacrifices women make to clothe men. Edna St. Vincent Millay won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for her collection of poems that bear the same name as this poem.
Songs in the form of ballads, which told a story, became a tradition in American popular songs of the 1960s, with songs like Bob Dylan’s Ballad of a thin man , or Waist deep in the big muddy by Pete Seeger.
Autobiography of Red
Contemporary Canadian poet and translator Anne Carson, a contemporary, based her book Autobiography of Red on an ancient Greek myth about a hero’s battle with a red-winged monster.
Small, red and erect, he waited,
tightly clutching his new backpack
with one hand and touching the lucky coin inside his coat pocket with the other,
while the first snows of winter
floated over her lashes and covered the branches around her and silenced
every trace of the world
Writing in free verse, Anne Carson recreated the monster as a cranky boy struggling with current conflicts over love and sexual identity. The poem is book-length and belongs to a new facet of the genre called the novel in verse . He alternates description with dialogue, and poetry with prose, as the story unfolds through different signifiers.
Unlike the long verse narratives of the works of antiquity, verse novels do not stick to pre-established forms. Russian author Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) used a complex rhyming form and unconventional meter for his verse novel Yevgeny Onegin ( Eugene Onegin ), and English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) wrote Aurora Leigh in verse . white (poetry with meter but without rhyme). Also using the same literary technique, Robert Browning (1812-1889) composed his novel From Him The Ring and the Book from a series of monologues by different narrators.
Sources
Alfred Tennyson. Lord. Idylls of the King . The Camelot Project. University of Rochester. https://d.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/publication/idylls-of-the-king-1859-1885
Anne Carson. Autobiography of Red . Random House, Vintage Contemporaries, 2013.
Catherine Addison. The Verse Novel as Genre: Contradiction or Hybrid? Style. Vol 43, No 4 2009. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/style.43.4.539
Henry W. Longfellow. The Song of Hiawatha . Maine Historical Society. http://www.hwlongfellow.org/poems_poem.php?pid=62
Jorge Luis Borges. Nine Dantesque Essays. Nepeus Editions, Buenos Aires, 1982.
Kevin Clark. Time, Story, and Lyric in Contemporary Poetry . The Georgia Review, 2014.
