ShmoopTube

00:03

Here's your shmoop du jour, brought to you by Death. Maybe the Reaper wouldn't be so

00:08

Grim if he took a few more vacation days each year.

00:18

The verse form of this poem is a... what?

00:21

And here are the potential answers...

00:27

Here's another question where there's no way to decipher, interpret or deduce...

00:31

...we just have to know our different types of poetry, and correctly determine which category this one falls into.

00:37

Is it an ode?

00:39

No. You'd know if you were reading an ode because your eyelids would be getting droopy,

00:44

you'd have taken a half dozen bathroom breaks, and there'd be a new President.

00:48

In other words... they're long. This is just a shorty, so... can't be an ode.

00:54

An elegy?

00:55

Looks a little like "eulogy"... and is closely related.

01:00

Elegies express grief. At first glance, with words like death, poison and sickness jumping

01:08

out at us...

01:09

...elegy doesn't seem like such a bad choice.

01:13

But check out that last line:

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And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

01:18

Despite the morbid subject matter, this poem is actually ends on a hopeful and positive note.

01:25

Let's see if there's a better option...

01:27

C -- a villanelle?

01:29

If we know our terms, this one's easy to nix -- villanelle's HAVE to be 19 lines, by definition.

01:37

D -- a sonnet?

01:38

Bingo. The 14 lines should have been a dead giveaway.

01:46

And just to clear the bases... it's not an epic because epics... are even longer than odes.

01:54

We're talking 3 to 4 presidential terms before you get through one of those beasts...

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