The heavy lifting of poetry is by the images poets choose to convey meaning and experience, together with the rhyme schemes they adopt to add musicality to the verse. Images can be of various kinds, as also can rhymes. Images and rhyme are the muscle and flesh of a poem.

Images come into play when poets use one thing to stand for another. Images are primarily of two sorts, metaphors and similes, which are simply metaphors introduced by “like” or “as”. In a metaphor a poet gives us something familiar to help us understand and experience something less familiar. A good image can make a lasting impression and convey a deeply meaningful experience.

We need to say a bit more about the role of meter and line and how they contribute to making verse an art form. Meter and line provide the skeleton and sinews of a poem. They give shape and rhythm to the words that hang on them stanza after stanza. The more regular they are, the more the poem “feels” like a poem. Much of contemporary poetry has thrown off all requirements of regular structure and demonstrates very little regard for meter and line as these have been practiced over the centuries in traditional English verse. I find such poems more difficult to read and appreciate, and to recall or commend. Many very fine examples of what is referred to as “free verse” exist, but I regard them as the exception. For our purposes I want to consider as an art in the long-standing tradition of the arts, those poems that honor the value of regular meter and line length.

Undoubtedly, a sizeable majority of people today, including most Christians, would answer the question above, “Not I.” It’s hard enough to get people to read these days, much less to read verse. So estranged is the reading public from any diet of poetry that, not that long ago, one of our leading poets published an important book bearing the title, Can Poetry Matter?