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The language of Poems for Children: A Stylistic Case Study. Lesley Jeffries In this essay, Jeffries is looking at the stylistic features of poems for children, especially the anthology "100 Poems for Children". These stylistic features raise questions about the function of poetry in children's lives. For adults, reading poetry is an activity that is done alone, which gives the person time to think about the music in it and the poem's meanings. While for children, reading poems in an experience shared with caregivers, teachers, and other children. But whether the poem is read in solitary or aloud, the music of the language is foregrounded to a certain degree. Although this anthology contains some poems in free verse (unrhymed), the majority have poetic forms like a patterned metre or rhyme scheme. This's because children appreciate the musicality in poems. Foregrounding: It's a linguistic strategy or technique that draws attention to itself, causing the reader's attention to shift away from 'what' is said to 'how' it is said. It's been said that literature is a process of 'strange making', meaning that the world or a certain perspective are presented in a way that separates them from real life experience through literary devices that manipulate elements to separate the literary experience and the real experience, and therefore making it strange or unfamiliar. The purpose of foregrounding is to sharpen the reader's vision and understanding of the events, feelings, and concepts that the author wants to point out. There are many techniques to create foregrounding like repetition, ambiguity, metaphor, tone, parallelism, diction (or language style). Short said that foregrounded features are the parts of the text which the author is signalling as crucial to our understanding of his work. Foregrounded and backgrounded features can occur at any level of the language, from phonetics to text structure. There are two ways in which a feature can be foregrounded. First, is the deviation. It can be external deviation: where the features break the rules of the language as a whole and go against anything that the reader considers 'normal' in texts. It also can be internal deviation: this occurs when there's a norm that the writer has established for that particular text, then you find some features that are different from this norm, these are the foregrounded features. For example, a certain poem is written in rhyming couplets, but then you find a couplet that doesn't rhyme. Second is parallelism, which is the use of elements that are similar or identical in grammar, structure, sound, meaning, or meter. See the example in the Red Reader p.220. The musical structure of poems for children: Before reading this section, please refer to this helpful link to get a better understanding of rhyme and meter. (https://penandthepad.com/measure-rhyme-meter-poem-3885.html ).

The sounds of a poem are very important to children. The majority of the poems in the anthology "100 Poems for Children" have musical structure, whether metrical, rhyming or both. In this section, we'll look at examples of foregrounded and backgrounded metre, and deviation within metrical patterning. The metre in children's poetry is regular, which gives the indication that it's a background feature that has a little impact on the meaning or literary effect other than making the text poetic. However, this's not true because some metrical patterns can indicate a particular type of poem. The choice to use different metres or no metre at all is also important. We might think that children appreciate the simple rhyme scheme more. But actually, children come in different ages and have different preferences. A good anthology should show them the delights of every musical structure whether simple rhyme scheme, unrhymed, unmetrical poetry, or poems with complex rhyme schemes and rhythms. Other sound effects in poems for children: So far, we've looked at foundational patterns of stress and rhymes that are considered, to a certain extent, as background. More foregrounded are poems written without specific metre or rhyme scheme or both, they are considered foregrounded because they are rare in anthologies for children. Still, these poems have a specific number of syllables in a line, for example, to prevent them from being entirely formless. Also, there are other patterns of sound in poetry like alliteration (it occurs when a series of words in a row, or close together, have the same first consonant sound. E.g. She sells sea-shells by the sea shore), and assonance (which is the repetition of vowel sounds in nearby words. Eg. the rain in Spain falls mainly in the plains). Such devices can be focused on sounds that will produce music, but they can be meaningful, too. Being onomatopoeic is the most obvious way in which sounds can be meaningful. onomatopoeia is the naming of a thing or action by a vocal imitation of the sound associated with it \ or the use words that imitate or sound just like the source of the sound they describe. For example, if you find the word 'miaow' in a poem, you'll know that there's a cat even in the writer doesn't use the word 'cat'. These devices are attractive to children. Also, there's a less clear type of reflection of sounds in poetry, which usually occurs across a longer stretch of text and may result from a combination of similar or identical sounds. Refer to the example in p.224. Short described an extended 'sound-symbolism' that refers to relations between the sounds of words and other aspects of the things that the word refers to, like size or brightness. "A Spell for Sleeping" is a lullaby that displays some sound-symbolism. In the first line, "curtains are clouding the casement windows", the noticeable sound pattern is the alliteration of /k/ sounds. Producing that sound requires a physical closure of the vocal tract at the soft palate, which can

be understood as an imitation of the closing many curtains on different windows one after the other. Wordplay in poems for children: Wordplay is the most expected feature of poems for children after musicality. The creation of new words is one of the joys of learning your first language when you're growing up. Wordplay can occur on phonological (sounds) or graphological (written spellings) or morphological (word structure) levels of language. In the poem 'Eletelephony' you can see the wordplay with 'elephant' and 'telephone' on phonological and graphological levels. On a morphological level, the writer might change the word class of a certain word, for example, from noun to verb. Something like this can be considered internal deviation if the rest of the poem doesn't contain invented words or wordplay. Another type of wordplay is 'lexical deviation', which is a term used to describe spelling and pronunciation of a word or a sentence that does not conform to a norm. Carroll uses this in his "Jabberwocky" where he adds the suffix -y to a non-existent word "slithe" to make it "slithy". Although we don't' know the meaning of the word, we do know that it's being used as an adjective, which enables us to make out the grammatical relationship between it and other words in the sentence. Carroll used patterns of sound-symbolism to help us understand his work better. Another type of wordplay is when words are used alongside other words that they wouldn't normally occur together. For example, in the poem "Song of the Worms", the author used the word 'disgust' with the 'soles of boots', which is something unexpected. Voice: Poets of the 20th century have been interested in using the vernacular in poetic contexts. Some used dialect forms throughout the whole poem (e.g. the Caribbean dialect poem 'Wha Me Mudder Do'), while others used it in occasional lexical items (e.g. the use of ain't instead of haven't). There are poems that use a particular register of language like 'The Race to Get to Sleep', which is a poem that pictures an adult using the register of the racing commentator to encourage children into their pyjamas and into bed. Refer to p.229. Although it's not a universal feature, evoking spoken language is an important stylistic feature of poetry for children. Structures in poems for children: Stylistic approaches to poetry usually focus on the linguistic choices that are made within the poem rather than the form itself. Nevertheless, looking at the boundaries between song and poem is considered a comment on the form of the poem from a stylistic angle. These boundaries are not very clear in children's poems, there are many similarities between them. "The Fairies", for example, have the first stanza repeated with minor changes as the last stanza.

One of the structuring devices that took the place of formal metrical structure in some recent poems is the conversation. This form usually begins with a question and may provide a punchline ending. Another structuring devices are those structured around numbers. They're usually aimed at younger children and have an educational function in addition to their poetic function. They usually use minor sentences with no main verb throughout. Positioning the child-reader: Many poems for children display present-tense description as their main stylistic characteristic. The present-tense, first-person narrative and a strong sense of place create a central point from where the scene being described is viewed and this becomes the reader's viewpoint. These poems have a strong effect that takes the reader to the centre of the text. In some poems, the present tense seems to be referring to the 'present' of the narrator, which seems like an invitation for the readers to imagine themselves in the moment of composition. The place in which the narration is happening is also evoked by deictic words and structures (me, here, now). Also, the use of the first-person pronoun envokes a deictic centre (the viewpoint of the 'I' character), and depending on whether there is a second-person addressee, the reader could adopt the first- or second-person position in the narrative. Sometimes, there's no direct addressee, which invites the reader to take up the viewpoint of the narrator. "Dover Beach" is the only first-person love poem in the collection, it has an important role in taking children poetry towards the subjects of adult poetry. The poem's positioning of the reader inside this emotional situation is one of the reasons for its power. Another group of children's poems tell the narrative straightforwardly by using past tense and third-person narrative. In those poems, the reader is taken by the narrator from one part of the scene to another, privileged in knowing all. Recent developments in stylistics have included cognitive approaches to the experience of readers as they read texts. One these is the idea that the features of a text may create an imaginary centre that the reader is most likely to adopt as their viewpoint. Another cognitive theory, which has been used to describe the effects of prose narration is text world theory. This defines the way in which texts create a text world that may differ from the real world, also the reader is invited to recreate as they read. This theory depends on detailed description. Foregrounding also plays a part in creating that text world. Another textual practice that also helps in creating the worlds of children's poetry is the use of 'negation' (denial). "The listeners" for example attracts children with its spooky atmosphere. The title of the poem hints the presence of people (or ghosts?). The first stanza shows the traveller knocking on the door and getting o answer. The description of what doesn't happen is as detailed and vivid as what

does happen, which creates an interesting text world for the reader who can imagine both the scenes as described.

Composed by: Mennah Alshafey...