Week 14 Essay: Poetic Speech and Style

This week I read from the unit, Fables of La Fontaine, which was written in the poetic style. The stories were a collection of Aesop's Fables from a French writer and I definitely recognized a few stories, but most were completely new.

The poetic style has always been hard for me to read and understand, so I generally try to stray away from reading poetry when I can. I have never understood the beauty of poetry or heard the underlying meanings that I am told poetry holds. The largest problem I find when I am reading poetry is I cannot understand a lot of the language used and I fail to see the metaphors that are often central to understanding the poem. Though I do not personally prefer the poetic style that was used in the Fables of La Fonatine, I believe that the style really was an important element of the stories. The style allows the moral to be driven home, without it having to be flat out stated multiple times.

A strategy I used to better understand the poetic language and style is reading the poem through once and then a second time to try and actually understand what the poet was trying to tell me. Also, a lot of the stories were similar to other Aesop's Fables that I had read in past units and that helped me be able to understand the underlying moral easier and for the new fables, I looked up analysis of those stories to help myself better understand them.

Overall, I enjoyed these poems much more than I have in the past and I think that is because I generally enjoy the stores of Aesop's Fables. I think in order to grow to like poetry in general would be to read poems about things and stories that I am already familiar with so that it can be much easier to understand.

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