ALMOST HARDLY’S LANGUAGE ARTS STUDY GUIDE & WORKSHEET (Parent, teacher, or tutor version)

Study Guide: What is ? Samuel Taylor Coleridge says that poetry consists of the best words in the best order. Take for example this statement: “Don’t ask what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for it.” These are good words. and they state well the idea of actively helping your country. But consider this version of the same idea: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” Here President John F. Kennedy uses a classical Greek poetic device, chiasmus (crossing), to balance two opposing ideas and draw attention to the worthier of the pair. Our mock-epic poem is by no means on a level with President Kennedy’s inaugural address, but it uses several poetic devices to elevate the narrative (story) above the day-to-day goings on of the swamp. Among these devices are rhyme, repetition, and refrain, three elements that unify the structure of the poetic narrative. Our story is told in stanzas of four lines each with repetition and refrain providing connecting links from stanza to stanza. Each stanza also contains internal rhyme in the third line: With cousins and brothers and uncles and others, for example. The consistent repetition of this helps unify the narrative because the reader or listener comes to expect it. Here are some of the poetic devices you will find in the Almost Hardly poems: REFRAIN: In the first stanza we find the repetition of the words “almost hardly.” The second line gives our hero a name: Almost Hardly, and we find out as we go through the poem that the capitalized version, Almost Hardly, refers to our frog by name. The other uses of these words shown in lower case refer to the meaning of the phrase almost hardly as an adverb meaning “scarcely,” “nearly,” or “barely.” In all but one stanza the refrain appears twice. In the entire narrative it appears 27 times as the frog’s name and 25 times as an adverb. RHYME (also RIME): In poetry written in English, end rhyme is very common. especially if the poet is using some of the older poetic structures such as the , the limerick, and various forms of the . Verse without rhyme ( (free verse) seems to be increasingly more popular in contemporary poetry. Almost Hardly mixes the two forms by avoiding rhyme in the first two lines and line four, the last line. Line three, however, uses internal rhyme to make a long line sound like two short ones. At the party he’s steal a kiss and a meal. Occasionally, as in the case of the first stanza, the third line is simply too long for the page and has to be broken into two lines, creating a five line stanza. It is hoped that this interweaving of free verse and rhyme will contribute to the sense of action in the poem.