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What Is Poetic Merit?

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Poetic Merit is how songs could be identified as a poem without the music. A song can have poetic merit if it has end rhymes, allusions, figurative language, and many other elements. With the song that I picked, The Sound of Silence by Simon and Garfunkel, I believe it has the poetic elements of ending rhymes, personification, and how I think they wrote the song about a man accepting his depression. First off, the reason I chose to talk about end rhymes is because when people started to write poetry, it was common end the lines to rhyme with another in a stanza. In The Sound of Silence, each stanza follows a pattern of “AABBCCD.” For instance, the first stanza of the song follows the pattern by ending the lines with “friend...again...creeping...sleeping...brain...remain...silence.”

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