Poetry Friday - Bereft
I have been reading a little about poetical forms and metrical poetry lately. Don't ask me why, I just decided to make it something I was going to read about. The use of rhyme and meter creates a poem in ways we may not even detect. So here is a superb example of a metrical poem in which the use of rhyme also builds the mood. I think this is a tetrameter which is primarily iambic, though the lines don't begin with an iamb - and that's the sort of thing you can learn about poetic forms.
Bereft
Where had I heard this wind before
Change like this to a deeper roar?
What would it take my standing there for,
Holding open a restive door,
Looking down hill to a frothy shore?
Summer was past and day was past.
Somber clouds in the west were massed.
Out in the porch's sagging floor,
Leaves got up in a coil and hissed,
Blindly struck at my knee and missed.
Something sinister in the tone
Told me my secret must be known:
Word I was in the house alone
Somehow must have gotten abroad,
Word I was in my life alone,
Word I had no one left but God.
Robert Frost