Songs Equal To Poetry Essay

Songs Equal to Poetry

““Poetry is dead,” playwright Gwydion Suilebhan tweeted Monday. What pretends to be poetry now is either New Age blather or vague nonsense or gibberish. It’s zombie poetry” (Petri). In this new day and age, such a bold claim that poetry is dead might not come as a surprise to some. It seems that other ways of literature such as music have taken over. Yet, at times it can be seen that poetry and music are similar and equal in their artistic value. Both use poetic devices that tell a story and relay a message to their audiences. The similar themes and use of poetic devices such as similes, rhyme scheme, and assonances in the song “Best Fake Smile” by James Bay and the poem “Finding Happiness” by Brian Spivey show that these

The rhyme scheme of a song or poem sets the entire mood or tone for the piece. Songs and poems have a special form of language that is used in themselves and that is created from the rhyme scheme. As it is stated in “What Use Is Poetry?”: “A poet uses language as a painter uses color, a primary material out of which to make art” (Alexander). “Best Fake Smile” has a different rhyme scheme than “Finding Your Happiness”, but they in the end both do the same purpose. They draw attention to specific lines to get the point of the piece across as beautifully as they can. In “Best Fake Smile”, two lines in every paragraph rhyme, but there is no specific order as to which two lines. “If you don 't bleed it you don 't need it anymore / If you don 't need it get up and leave it on the floor / ” (29-30). This rhyme draws attention to the lines by signifying that if something is not as important as blood to a person then they do not need it. “Finding Your Happiness” has a more specific rhyme scheme than “Best Fake Smile”. The poem rhymes every second and fourth line of each paragraph to highlight how they relate to each other. For example, the lines: “Others claim that it 's the rain / While some may be looking for pain / ” (6 & 8), connect rain and pain to each other and how some people connect those things to happiness. Although the rhyme schemes of these two pieces do not seem alike, they are because each rhyme two lines of a paragraph to identify their significance to the overall piece. They move the story along and reveal a