What are POETIC LICENSES

The poetry is a form of writing that characterized by measurement. Poets and female poets manage to connect their feelings, ideas or emotions with an exact vocabulary. To be free in their art, they must have a deep understanding of poetic technique and make decisions about the characteristics of the syllables, the length and the ending of the words they use. In this lesson from a TEACHER you will learn what are the poetic licenses with examples and what are they used for in poetry.

Before seeing what poetic licenses are, you need to understand what they are. For this, it is essential to be clear 4 concepts that make up poetry:

• Verse: they are each of the lines that make up a poem. Lets give a rhythm and rhyme.
• Stanza: It is the set of verses that make up a poem, which can have both one stanza and several. Lets give the poem a structure.
• Syllable: is the set of divisions of sounds that make up a word. For example, the word "bird" has three syllables: bird.
• Metrics: is the number of poetic syllables that make up a verse. The metric is responsible for measuring syllables and thinking about how to organize the verses and the words that compose it.
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In this way, we could say that poems are sets of stanzas that in turn are composed of verses. These lines make use of certain syllables to acquire rhythm and rhyme; to have a certain metric.

Where do the poetic licenses? Well these arise when you want create a verse with a particular symmetrical syllabic measure. That is, when we want to have a specific type of verse. For this it is necessary that let's measure the verses, that we know the number of syllables that compose it.

Poetic licenses are used when a certain rhythm is desired and it is necessary to have a certain number of syllables within the verse. This resource serves to add or subtract syllables through various grammatical strategies. Thus, if the poet wishes to have 9 exact syllables he must alter the structure of the verse to achieve it.

To alter the verses there are 4 specific types that allow us add or subtract syllables in the verses. Next, you will be able to know what the poetic licenses are with examples.

Sinalefa

The sinalefa It is used to group vowels that belong to different words. This allows two syllables become one at the moment of pronouncing them. It is done by joining the final syllable of one word with the initial syllable of another. With this we can subtract a syllable from the verse.

For example, in the sentence “Camitheit iswas lying down ”, the ending in“ a ”of Camila and the beginning in "e" of was generates a synalepha. Let us now look at a fragment of Sonnet XLIV by One hundred sonnets of love from Pablo Neruda:

You will know not I love you So what I love you

since in two ways is life,

the word is a wing of silence,

the fire is half cold.

In this case the first verse has two synalephs with the words "tandtomo ”, which would allow two syllables to be subtracted from the total meter of the verse because“ te ”and“ a ”are pronounced as a single syllable.

Hiatus

This is a resource that is used to prevent synalepha. We find the case that one word ends in a vowel and the next also; however, the vowels are pronounced separately and the two syllables are counted separately. This is accomplished by entering a word with a rhythmic accent on its last syllable or by entering a punctuation mark or conjunction that requires a pause in pronunciation. In the first case, we can take a verse by the poet Vicente Gaos as an example:

Does not know What is it love who does not love you

Here the word "what" carries an accent of rhythmic intensity that prevents the synalepha and produces a hiatus between "what" and "is". That is, we count two syllables in the verse.

In the second case, various poets use conjunctions such as "and" to generate a hiatus. For example, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz uses it in the following verse:

And later passed out and shrunken

In this case, by introducing the conjunction between "fainted" and "shrunken" the author avoids the sinalefa and produces a hiatus, given that the syllable "da" of "desmayada" is counted as one and the conjunction "y" joins the syllable "en" of "shrink" adding another syllable.

Syneresis

The syneresis reside in create a diphthong in a word it doesn't. Let us remember that the diphthong it occurs when two different vowels are joined in the same syllable of a word (these vowels cannot have an accent or accent). For example, the word save produces a diphthong with the vowels "ua" and look after with "ui". Let's see this verse by the Spanish poet Francisco Villaespesa:

All of pride and of creation shaking

If we can notice, in the word "creation" it is separated into the syllables creation. However, in this case the author produces a false diphthong between the vowels "ea" to unite both syllables, crea-tion. This resource allows subtract a syllable to the total of the meter of the verse.

Dieresis

To finish the explanation of what the poetic licenses are, the umlaut is in charge of separate two vowels that form a diphthong in its normal pronunciation. This allows add one more syllable to the verse, because it breaks with the normal pronunciation of the word.

The separation of the diphthong is achieved by putting an umlaut (¨) in a vowel that does not carry it. For example, in this verse by the poet Fray Luis de León an umlaut is introduced in the letter "u":

The one from which the rüido worldly flees