Lesson Plan For Types of PIC-LITS: Types of Poetry: Descriptive Poetry
OBJECTIVE:
- To allow students to be able to recognize different components of descriptive poetry
- To give students practice writing descriptive poetry
What are Some Types of Poetry?
There are many types of poems:
- Narrative poems tell a story about an experience.
- Descriptive poems explore the sensory experience of a moment by evoking all five senses.
- Formal verse is poetry that follows a set rhythm and rhyme scheme.
- Blank verse is poetry that follows a set rhythm (five main beats per line) but does not follow a rhyme scheme.
- Free verse is poetry that does not follow a set rhythm and does not follow a rhyme scheme.
- Descriptive poems explore the sensory experience of a moment by evoking images to the eye, ear, nose, touch, and tongue.
Below is an example of descriptive poetry excerpted from Elizabeth Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses”.
Although it is a cold evening,
down by one of the fishhouses
an old man sits netting,
his net, in the gloaming almost invisible,
a dark purple-brown,
and his shuttle worn and polished.
The air smells so strong of codfish
it makes one’s nose run and one’s eyes water.
The five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofs
and narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up
to storerooms in the gables
for the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on.
All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea,
swelling slowly as if considering spilling over,
is opaque, but the silver of the benches,
the lobster pots, and masts, scattered
among the wild jagged rocks,
is of an apparent translucence
like the small old buildings with an emerald moss
growing on their shoreward walls.
The poet develops the sensory experience of the Nova Scotia coastline. Three of the five senses—sight, smell, and touch—are developed.
- Sight: “the five fishhouses with steeply peaked roofs”
- Smell: “The air smells so strong of codfish / it makes one’s nose run and one’s eyes water.”
- Touch: “it is a cold evening”
This sensory description places the reader into the coastline.
GUIDED PRACTICE WRITING PROMPT:
Write a descriptive poem by following the above model and definition. Write in the FREESTYLE mode on piclits.com.