Order in Free Verse

Order in Free Verse

To fully understand what order truly is, we must look to what order is not, and through this we will fully be able to dissect the concepts of order. Free verse is a style of writing poetry which is defined as poultry without any fixed metrical pattern, rhythm, or rhyme but which instead exhibits its own natural rhythms, sound patterns, and seemingly arbitrary principles of form. Many times when we think of free verse, we think that the poem does not have any internal links, connections, or order. This is simply an outlandish statements made by the many people who read free verse. Just because we might look at some poems and think that there is no order or pattern based upon an external assumption, this is simply wrong because we are missing the underlying meaning and order indubitably.

Looking directly at the work entitled “Mnemonic” by Li-Young Lee, this piece of poetry contains much order for a work that is claimed to be free verse because this piece of poetry contains many internal links between the speaker and the speaker’s father. The first example of this that we see in this piece of poetry is the son’s inability to speak eloquently through long sentences while the father, when talked about was referred to as “a serious man who devised complex systems of numbers and rhymes to aid him in remembering, a man who forgot nothing, my father”. Another instance in which one can find order in free verse is that the speaker has a memory of all things that had happened as well as the times in which he recalls what happened. Some examples of this duality between memory and recalling are the following: my father loved me and he spanked me and it hurt him to do so and he did it daily. The author asks us one question, “is it his memory or his recollections that to us seem illogical?” Another aspect of his poem is the emphasis placed on the relationship between the parents and the children, or in this case, the parent and child. This becomes the second and one of the most important places in which we find order in this free verse poem. When parents act towards their children in ways such as spanking, we figure out that these ways are obviously determined by their culture. When we step back to think how people remember their culture, it’s by pure memory, aside from the physical aspect. They memorize and remember what their parents, grandparents, and great grandparents did to them, and the cultural perspective on that. So when the poem emphasizes the somewhat mysterious relationship between the parent and the child, we realize that after the parents’ deaths the parents still live, but this time they live within the range of their child’s memory span, and