Ancient poetry never ceases to amaze me. There are a lot of hidden gems in dense poetry that are easy to overlook when reading it, even in nursery rhymes. In this blog post, we will take a look at the classic poem Jack and Jill and see what makes it such an interesting poem.
The poem
Jack and Jill went up the hill To fetch a pail of water; Jack fell down and broke his crown, and Jill came tumbling after. Up Jack got, and home did trot, As fast as he could caper, To old Dame Dob, who patched his nob With vinegar and brown paper.Mother Goose, Poetry Foundation
The story of Jack and Jill is pretty straightforward: they both went up a hill to get some water and got hurt in the process. The second stanza is not recited often, but is very important to the overall form of the poem.
First, let's take a look at the rhyme scheme. This form of poetry can easily pass as a ballad because it has two stanzas that follow the rhyme pattern xaxa:
Jack and Jill went up the hill (x) To fetch a pail of water; (a) Jack fell down and broke his crown, (x) and Jill came tumbling after. (a) Up Jack got, and home did trot, (x) As fast as he could caper, (a) To old Dame Dob, who patched his nob (x) With vinegar and brown paper. (a)
As illustrated above, the rhymes alternate: hill/crown don't rhyme but water/after do. trot/nob don't rhyme, but caper/paper do.
The rhyme established between water/after is called consonance, because the stressed vowels don't rhyme at all (the first syllable of each), but the unstressed syllables do (the second syllable of each word).
Why does this matter? Because the weak rhyme connection shows that a problem was encountered in the poem. Perfect rhyme, on the other hand, is used to depict that everything is going well in the story. The weaker the rhyme, the more dissonance or tension in the poem. Tension shows that something went ary.
The second verse, where caper and paper are used to achieve perfect rhyme, shows that the health of Jack has returned to normal, or at least there is something positive happening compared to the previous stanza. This is equivalent to how songs can go from a bright mood, to a temporary dark mood (like the bridge of a song), back to the mood that was established in the beginning.
The bottom line
I hope you could see the importance of form in poetry from this blog post. Form was appreciated much more back then, and was used by most poets from William Shakespeare to Emily Dickinson. Form enhances the communication in the poem and also helps to invoke emotion.