Essay (Alternative Sources of Energy)

An alternative energy, or more precisely an alternative energy source is one that may replace the current energy sources or energy, whether their lower polluting effect, or primarily for its possibility of renewal. Energy consumption is one of the major gauges of progress and welfare of society. The concept of "energy crisis" appears when energy sources from which the company supplies are exhausted. An economic model as the current operation of which depends on continuous growth requires an equally growing demand for energy. As sources of fossil and nuclear energy are finite, it is inevitable that at any given time demand can be supplied and the whole system to collapse, unless they discover and develop new methods for energy: these would be alternative energy. Together with this is that the abuse of conventional energy present today such as oil from coal combustion among other issues carry with them as progressive worsening pollution, increased greenhouse gases and perforation of the layer ozone.


Scientists are currently looking for solutions to solve this impending crisis. So they find some alternative sources that they can use. There are wind energy, hydropower, tidal energy, wave energy, solar energy, geothermal energy and biomass energy.

The Little Sampaguita (Natividad Marquez)

Little sampaguita
With the wondering eye
Did a tiny fair
Drop you where you lie?

In the witching hour
Of the tropic night 
Did the careless moonbeam
Leave you in its fight? 

Structures of Poetry

The Line: A line of poetry is not like a sentence. Just because the words are one line, it doesn’t

mean that the complete thought is finished.

When reading poetry, and you reach the end of the line and there is no punctuation

after the last word, do not pause – continue reading as you would any sentence.

·         Example:  You would read the following

   “I lie in bed fully awake. The darkness

   breathes to the pace of a dog’s snoring.

   The film is replayed to sounds

   Of an intricate blues guitar.”

     “Late Movies with Skylar”

     Michael Ondaatje  

   the same way you would read

“I lie in bed fully awake. The darkness breathes to the pace of a

dog’s snoring. The film is replayed to sounds of an intricate blues

guitar.”  

However, this does not mean that what appears on a  single line of poetry is not

important. When reading poetry, or when writing your own, pay close attention to how

the lines are being broken up. A line of poetry does not have to end when the sentence

ends, and a period or comma does not have to appear at the end of the line either. Take

a look at these examples and notice how the poets are breaking the line.

“Like wet cornstarch, I slide

   past my grandmother’s eyes. Bible

   at her side, she removes her glasses.”  

      “Refugee Ship”

      Lorna Dee Cervantes “What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families

   shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the

   avocados, babies in the tomatoes!”

      “A Supermarket in California”

      Allen Ginsberg

Caesura: Most commonly, a caesura is punctuation somewhere else other than at the end of a

line of poetry.

·         Example: “There are their fragments, all I remember of them,

wanting more knowledge of them. In the mirror and in my kids

I see them in my flesh. Wherever we are

they parade in my brain…”

      “Light”

      Michael Ondaatjie

Enjambment: When the idea or phrase in a poem is carried over from one line into the next.

·         Example: “Black reapers with the sound of steel on stones

   are sharpening scythes. I see them place the hones

   in their hip-pockets as a thing that’s done,

   and start their silent swinging, one by one.”

      “Reapers”

      Jean Toomer

Features of Poetry

Ancient Filipino poetry is an extension of earlier cultures of Southeast Asia, having a common Malayo-Polynesian cultural source.Poems have meaning. Poems can describe an interesting place or person, tell a story or explain feelings.

✣ Poems have sounds. Poems sound different from other types of writing. Poems may have rhyming words, a regular rhythm like music, words with repeated sounds, or even words that sound like their meaning.

✣ Poems have images. Poems create pictures in our mind, called images. Images often refer to our sense of sight, smell, sound, taste and touch. An image may describe something, or it may compare one thing to another. Images help you see something as if it is really there.

✣ Poems have lines. Poems have lines that may be long or short, and can be made up of whole sentences or sentence fragments. Some poems have lines arranged in stanzas. A stanza is agroup of lines that are arranged in a definite pattern. In other poems, the lines make a picture or shape to illustrate the topic.

✣ Poems have patterns. Poems have patterns of letters, syllables and words. These patterns often help you to hear the rhythm of a poem. Some types of poems have patterns with a particular number of syllables in each line, and others have words repeated throughout the poem. As you read through this book, you will find out more about the features of poems, and how you can use them to write your own poetry.

Sources of Poetry

The purported basis of the work was the manuscript which became known as the Percy Folio. Percy found the folio in the house of his friend Humphrey Pitt. It was on the floor and Pitt's maid had been using the leaves to light fires. Once rescued, Percy would use forty-five of the ballads in the folio for his book despite claiming the bulk of it came from this folio. Other sources were the Pepys Library of broadside ballads collected bySamuel Pepys and Collection of Old Ballads published in 1723, possibly by Ambrose Philips. Bishop Percy was encouraged to publish the work by his friends Samuel Johnson and William Shenstone who also found and contributed ballads.

Percy did not treat the folio nor the work in them with scrupulous care. He wrote his own notes on the folio pages, emended the rhymes and even pulled pages out of the document. He was criticised for these actions even at the time, most notably by Joseph Ritson a fellow antiquary. The folio he worked from seems to have been written by a single copyist and errors such as pan and wale for wan and pale needed correcting.

Basic Elements of Poetry

Prosody

Prosody is the study of the meter, rhythm, and intonation of a poem. Meter is the definitive pattern established for a verse (such as iambic pentameter), while rhythm is the actual sound that results from a line of poetry. Prosody also may be used more specifically to refer to the scanning of poetic lines to show meter.

Rhythm: The methods for creating poetic rhythm vary across languages and between poetic traditions. Languages are often described as having timing set primarily by accents, syllables, or moras, depending on how rhythm is established, though a language can be influenced by multiple approaches. For example:

Japanese is a mora-timed language. 

Latin, Catalan, French and Spanish are syllable-timed languages. 

English, Russian and, generally, German are stress-timed languages. 

Chinese, Vietnamese, Lithuanian, and most Sub-Saharan languages are Tonal languages

Meter: In the Western poetic tradition, meters are customarily grouped according to a characteristic metrical foot and the number of feet per line. Some examples of metric system are:

Ø  Iambic pentameter. It contains five feet per line, in which the predominant kind of foot is the "iamb. It system originated in ancient Greek poetry, and was used by poets such as Pindar and Sappho, and by the great tragedians of Athens. 

Ø  Dactylic hexameter. It has six feet per line, of which the dominant kind of foot is the dactyl. Dactylic hexameter was the traditional meter of Greek epic poetry, the earliest extant examples of which are the works of Homer and Hesiod.

Meter is often scanned based on the arrangement of "poetic feet" into lines. In English, each foot usually includes one syllable with a stress and one or two without a stress. In other languages, it may be a combination of the number of syllables and the length of the vowel that determines how the foot is parsed, where one syllable with a long vowel may be treated as the equivalent of two syllables with short vowels. The generally accepted names for some of the most commonly used kinds of feet include:

·         spondee — two stressed syllables together

·         iamb — unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable

·         trochee — one stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable

·         dactyl — one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables

·         anapest — two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed syllable

·         pyrrhic - two unstressed syllables together (rare, usually used to end dactylic hexameter)\

The number of metrical feet in a line are described in Greek terminology as follows:

·         dimeter — two feet

·         trimeter — three feet

·         tetrameter — four feet

·         pentameter — five feet

·         hexameter — six feet

·         heptameter — seven feet

·         octameter — eight feet

Rhyme, Alliteration, Assonance: Rhyme, alliteration, assonance and consonance are ways of creating repetitive patterns of sound. They may be used as an independent structural element in a poem, to reinforce rhythmic patterns, or as an ornamental element. 

Rhyme consists of identical (hard-rhyme) or similar (soft-rhyme) sounds placed at the ends of lines or at predictable locations within lines (internal rhyme). Languages vary in the richness of their rhyming structures. 

Alliteration is the repetition of initial consonant sounds in two or more neighboring words or syllables. We find alliteration in many familiar phrases and expressions such as "down in the dumps."

Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds in non-rhyming words as in, "some ship in distress that cannot ever live." It is used in modern English-language poetry, and in Old French, Spanish and Celtic languages.

Rhyming Schemes: In many languages poets use rhyme in set patterns as a structural element for specific poet forms, such as ballads, sonnets and rhyming couplets. However, the use of structural rhyme is not universal. Much modern poetry avoids traditional rhyme schemes. Classical Greek and Latin poetry did not use rhyme. Rhyme entered European poetry in the High Middle Ages, in part under the influence of the Arabic language in Al Andalus (modern Spain).[50] Arabic language poets used rhyme extensively. Some rhyming schemes have become associated with a specific language, culture or period, while other rhyming schemes have achieved use across languages, cultures or time periods. Some forms of poetry carry a consistent and well-defined rhyming scheme, such as the chant royal or the rubaiyat, while other poetic forms have variable rhyme schemes.

History of Poetry

Poetry as an art form may predate literacy. Many ancient works, from the Vedas to the Odyssey, appear to have been composed in poetic form to aid memorization and oral transmission, in prehistoric and ancient societies. Poetry appears among the earliest records of most literate cultures, with poetic fragments found on early monoliths, rune stones and stelae.

The oldest surviving poem is the Epic of Gilgamesh, from the 3rd millennium BC in Sumer (in Mesopotamia, now Iraq), which was written in cuneiform script on clay tablets and, later, papyrus. Other ancient epic poetry includes the Greek epics, Iliad and Odyssey, and the Indian epics, Ramayana and the Mahabharata.

The efforts of ancient thinkers to determine what makes poetry distinctive as a form, and what distinguishes good poetry from bad, resulted in "poetics" — the study of the aesthetics of poetry. Some ancient societies, such as the Chinese through the Shi Jing, one of the Five Classics of Confucianism, developed canons of poetic works that had ritual as well as aesthetic importance. More recently, thinkers have struggled to find a definition that could encompass formal differences as great as those between Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Matsuo Basho's Oku no Hosomichi, as well as differences in context spanning Tanakh religious poetry, love poetry, and rap.

Context can be critical to poetics and to the development of poetic genres and forms. Poetry that records historic events in epics, such as Gilgamesh or Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, will necessarily be lengthy and narrative, while poetry used for liturgical purposes (hymns, psalms, suras and hadiths) is likely to have an inspirational tone, whereas elegy and tragedy are meant to evoke deep emotional responses. Other contexts include Gregorian chants, formal or diplomatic speech, political rhetoric and invective, light-hearted nursery and nonsense rhymes, and even medical texts.