Rhythm & Discipline

Our Creative Writing class is certainly a haven for artistic freedom, but we are also very disciplined in our approach, learning all of the "rules" of poetry so that we can choose to follow them or not. One of our recent assignments was to write in strict meter (the measured rhythm of lines of poetry). For instance, the following poem by senior Zhan Su is written in iambic tetrameter, which means that each line consists of 4 pairs of unstressed and stressed syllables:

Greed & Power

I am bestowed upon the King,

I am adored; reside the Wings.

The wings exude from God Himself,

The King assures, proclaims, persuades,

Forget we did, and dust-drowned shelf,

The day where God became unmade.

He cuts the Wings; he slashes, swings,

He gave it all, for God, His rings.