There are occasions when a poem without any rhyme or scansion pattern is justified, such as when it presents a "word-picture". Such word-pictures are the basis of, and justification for, Japanese haiku. The haiku in Japan consists of 17 "syllables" in three groups: 5, 7 and 5. I say "syllables" in quotes since they are not the exact equivalent of the term in the English language. Japanese is a syllabic language and its writing systems reflect that.

Here is a well-known haiku by a famed Japanese poet, Basho.

furuike ya, kawazu tobikomu, mizu no oto

(old pond, frog jumps, sound of water)

Many English poets have merely taken the 5,7,5 syllable concept and used that aspect alone in their works to call their poems "haiku". Is that OK? Not!

Here's a typical example of what is commonly called a "haiku" in English:

It is your birthday.

Let's take the dog for a walk

and enjoy ourselves.

Not the same thing at all; merely a lazy way of claiming that one has written a "poem".

So what's happening in the world of "Poetry"?

I theorise that it comes down to current western attitudes, the overwhelming expression of the "I want it now" culture and big business support for fulfilling this wish - "You can have it now".

Want a car? No need to save, no deposit required. No effort nor patience needed. We'll even fill in the form for you.

A house? Let's see! You're young and might well progress in life. Deposit? No need for that! Heck, we'll lend you 110% of the purchase cost if you want. It'll save you waiting till you can afford decent furniture.

Want to write a poem? No need to work at it. Just throw some words on a piece of paper. Better yet a computer screen. Call it a poem and nobody will challenge you!

One cloudless, moonless night in midsummer, 2005, I'd gone out into the garden to feed our dogs before retiring to bed. I looked up at the sky and was struck by the appearance of the Milky Way, brighter than I'd ever seen it before. As I gazed at all those stars I wondered which, if any of pinpoints of light, had planets hurtling around them and whether, on some of those planets, another being was also looking up in wonder at their own night sky. Then I thought about our own home planet, Earth, a tiny oasis of life and colour in a wilderness of space. It was a moving experience.

Words came to me and I jotted them down.

Here's what I could have written about the experience:

It's a dark, moonless, cloudless night.

I stare dumbfounded at the host of stars,

stretching out above me like a highway to heaven,

each star guiding its planets as a shepherd guides his sheep.

Maybe there's someone up there staring at his own night sky with similar thoughts to mine.

Space is so vast.

However did we get, did we deserve this Earth, our own planet. The sky is black and white but our planet, our oasis, is so colourful.

Instead I took time to create a sonnet of the experience.

On such a night as this I can but stare

into the heavens, struck dumb by what I see;

that infinite black with silvered filigree,

the million suns of heaven's thoroughfare.

Imagine this; around each shepherd star,

like sheep that dare not leave their guardian's lee,

whole worlds are clustered and each world might be

a home to others, living, like we are.

What hand of fate, what fortune gave me this,

this planet Earth, this mother to us all,

this world of sheer delight, this perfect home,

with sun that greets me daily with her kiss,

with mountain, river, valley, waterfall

and this, all this, in glorious polychrome?

I was pleased with the latter and would have been far less satisfied with the former. It's not skill that's needed - just patience, an ear for rhythm and a dictionary to help find suitable rhymes.

Which do you prefer?

Bring back formal verse!

The poem begins with a statement on the nature of change. The speaker suggests that change is not dramatic, easily recognised. Instead the is a natural, gradual, gentle change;

Things do not explode

They fail, they fade.

The use of “explode”, the rejection of that same idea, the confident tone of the poems opening line and the use of the alliterative “fail” and “fade” present the reader with a strong, persuasive declaration. The following four couplets then offer examples that illustrate the premise or proposition. This is an effect rhetorical technique. One such example of how things end can be found in the way

Sunlight fades from the flesh

Or

The foam drains quick in the sand

These lines represent snapshots. This cinematography gives a greater insight into the movement and colour that represent change. These attractive images enhance the senses of the reader. The repetitive F sounds - fail, fade, fades, flesh, foam - and the repetition of “they” and “as” contribute to the poems musical quality.

In the third couplet the word “even” announces another and stronger instance of the speakers belief in the nature of things:

Even love's lightning flesh

Has no thunderous end

Here there is the recognition of loves exciting nature - it's “lightning flash” - and also, it's fading away petering out, its ending without drama. This is due to the emotion “dies” slowly over a long period of time. The transient nature of life. Walcott presents the death of love as a truly distressing thing. The vacuum and silence after the slow fading of love is represented with a truly haunting image.

It dies with the sound

Of flowers fading like the flesh

The image of fading flowers is a familiar one. No flower explodes and the fact that nature fades away is a very effective reminder of the truth that things “fail” and “fade”. We know it, the poet says, from our noticing of the gradual fading away of flesh when wee use a pumice stone.

From sweating pumice stone

The speaker presents us with the final, intriguing couplet

Till we are left

With the silence that surrounds Beethoven's head.

The image of Beethoven brings alive an image of brilliance, genius, music, and creativity. The poem's final image reminds us of Beethoven's mind and his imagination expressed through his masterful music. This last stanza perhaps contradicts the first 5, as it can be interpreted that the work of art, in this instance music, can live beyond death, beyond the silence. However it can also be interpreted that even a great man such as Beethoven, will eventually “fail” and “fade”. It becomes a striking image of Endings.

- By William Butler Yeates

When considering great works of poetry, many people picture complicated prose, epic poems and the good old Shakespearean experience.  However, often times, it is the simplest phrase that can bring about the most emotional responses.

My family came to America in October 1991 from Belarus (Former Soviet Republic).  The important element to grasp is that even though minorities cry descrimination and religious groups cry persecution and Americans curse the immigrants, all of these people had more than we did.  My parents had no money, no jobs, and no language.  Despite having little money and little English, my family fought against the hard times and managed to earn their place in American Society. 

Despite their success, my parents always say that my sister and I are their reason for coming to this country, their reason for fighting against the current, and that we were and are their life.  My parent's could not afford to give us riches.  If they had "the heavens' embroidered cloths", they would have draped it on our shoulders and under our feet.  But all my parents truly had was their dreams.  Dreams that my sister and I will go further in life than they did, that we will be instilled with values and morals that my parents infused within us, and that we would always be close to our family.  Those are the dreams on which i tread and i tread ever so softly. 

The Best Laid Plans

"To a Mouse" actually contains one of the most often quoted lines when Burns wrote:

"The best laid schemes o' mice an' men, Gang aft agley, An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain" which when translated into plain English reads "The best laid schemes of mice and men, Go often askew, And leaves us nothing but grief and pain".

Watching this little creature scurrying for its life stirred Robert Burns to compare the life of a mouse with that of a human as he observed how it had escaped with its life following a close brush with death. How different from my own encounters with mice as we simply looked for ways to catch and kill them if found within the home, considering them as most people do, as vermin.

Perhaps if I had read this Burns poem a bit more carefully and understood its meaning, I would have been inclined to be more lenient on these harmless rodents who pose no danger to humans whatsoever. The only time I have attempted to rescue a mouse was when I witnessed one being tormented by a neighborhood cat for quite some time. It seemed as thought the cat had no intention of killing the mouse for food, but was content to play with it, allowing the frightened little creature to escape a few yards before pouncing on it again.

Cat Torture

Now that the mouse was not a pest in my eyes but an underdog in this battle for survival, I felt moved to become an ally and take action. I came to the rescue of the defenseless mouse by tossing a few pebbles in the direction of the playful cat who soon forgot all about the game it playing as stones began to descend on it. On reflection, the cat's cruelty toward the mouse had been replaced by my cruelty toward the cat. However, I felt fully justified as I watched the cat torture this little mouse mercilessly and decided it was time to bring it to an end.

Ultimately, the cat lived and so did the mouse, so no lasting harm was done and no-one called the RSPCA to charge me with abusing the neighborhood cat.

We'll start from square one and see where we can get to with it. English has natural stresses. For one thing, multisyllabic words have different degrees of stress. Take “multisyllabic” as an example. The syllable with the strongest stress is the first one: “mult.” But since the word is a prefix along with another word, “syllabic,” we have a secondary stress on “lab” of “syllabic.”

Also, when we talk, we stress different words. For example, if we want to be sure someone understands our message (e.g., a truculent child), we may emphasize the important words of it: I want YOU to GO HOME and GO to your ROOM. RIGHT NOW! In fact, one of the problems when computers read text is that they read all the words with the same level of stress and that actually makes language hard to understand. So we emphasize the meaning of words with stress.

Poetic meter has something to do with stress. In fact, one thing it does is to label the number of stressed syllables in a line, using Greek numerical prefixes: di-meter, tri-meter, tetrameter, pentameter, hexameter, heptameter, etc. That's 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 stresses, respectively.

Okay, that takes care of one of the big words you may have heard in relation to poetry. We'll get to the others in a minute.

How do you determine the number of stresses in a line? Think about a line of music and that will help. We all like to dance to the beat of music, and song lyrics' stress patterns are often arranged along the lines of music; that is, the stressed words are on beats, although there may be beats between words. How about that?

So let's look at this using some songs we know. If you clap on the beats of Mary Had a Little Lamb, you would get:

MA-ry HAD a LIT-tle LAMB, its FLEECE was WHITE as SNOW. There are six stresses in that line, so it is some form of hexameter.

Now let's take an old song, Beautiful Brown Eyes (I have always been fond of this one, since I have brown eyes):

BEAU-tiful BEAU-tiful BROWN EYES, i'll NEV-er love BLUE an-y MORE. This is seven stresses, heptameter.

Now, the other aspect of poetic meter has to do with how many syllables are between the stresses and whether there is an unstressed syllable before or after a stressed one. It's actually easy to remember these names and what they do-you can make the names “be” the stress patterns:

i-AMB, i-AMB, i-AMB, i-AMB, i-AMB

That's five iambs in a line, which would be iambic pentameter (used in sonnets and also in Shakespeare's plays). An iambic pentameter line would have ten syllables, beginning with an unstressed syllable, and in a pattern of unstress, STRESS. Here's an example from Shakespeare's first sonnet:

From fairest creatures we desire increase,

That thereby beauty's rose might never die,

But as the riper should by time decease,

His tender heir might bear his memory:

Here's another:

TRO-chee, TRO-chee, TRO-chee, TRO-chee, TRO-chee

A trochee is just the opposite of an iamb. So the above is a line of trochaic pentameter. The big words are just about ready to fly out of your mouth! Here's an example of trochaic poetry, from Longfellow's Hiawatha:

By the shores of Gitche Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,
Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.

But sometimes there are two unstressed syllables between the stressed ones, as in “BEAU-tiful.” Here are the two patterns for that:

DAC-tylic, DAC-tylic, DAC-tylic

ana-PEST, ana-PEST, ana-PEST

Here is an example of a dactylic poem:

The Charge of the Light Brigade

by

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Half a league, half a league,

Half a league onward,

All in the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

"Forward, the Light Brigade!

"Charge for the guns!" he said:

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

Theodore Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss, was riding on a train and the rhythm of the wheels on the tracks was anapestic:

And to think that I saw it on Mulberry Street.

That was his first book for children.

Finally, there's SPONDEE, which is where two or more syllables in a row are stressed.

But the rubber meets the road slightly differently in real life. If you did a whole poem (or a whole play) in iambic pentameter, it would be sing-songy and boring. So, most poets mix it up a little. Here is a sample from Robert Frost's great poem, Birches:

WHEN I see birches bend to left and right 

Across the line of straighter darker trees, 

I like to think some boy's been swinging them. 

But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay. 

Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them

This poem begins with four lines of perfect iambic pentameter: when I see BIRCH-es BEND, etc. The sound of the poem is like birch trees bending from side to side. Then, in the fifth line, the iambs are disrupted by a line of trochees, the way an ice storm would disrupt the even movement of trees back and forth. Isn't that cool!

How do you craft for this? Actually, don't worry about it at first. Just put down the meaning you want the poem to have-the metaphors and all that. Then you can start to craft for sound, including meter. If you read your poem out loud, you will probably find two or three places where you have a regular meter, possibly iambic or trochaic. That's because English is such a rhythmic language.

For example, in the above paragraph, “you read your poem out loud” is a series of iambs (okay, so I'm pronouncing “poem” as a single-syllable word-I cheated. Sue me). I could use those words as a starting point for a particular line “where you have a regular meter” is trochee, trochee, dactyl, trochee (I'm starting with a stress on “where,” but you might read it differently from me. That's okay). That's a nice pattern because it has some regular aspects and is broken up just enough to be rhythmically interesting. If I want to turn those trochees into iambs, all I have to do is put an unstressed syllable in front-such as: “is where you have a regular meter.” By the way, I did not write the paragraph above with the intention of using these words as example-so you can see how prose can have a rhythm to it for a few words.

Now, poets don't use one-syllable words all the time, so here is an example from my undying prose that demonstrates how that rhythm can be handled: “intention of using these words as example.” This is dactylic, with a beginning unstressed syllable (the “in” of intention) and the dactyls consist of multisyllabic words and single-syllable words.

How do you find the words you need in order to fill out a pattern? Well, meaning comes first, so use a thesaurus as you write. You may find a synonym for what you want to say that has a different stress pattern in it. Or you may find that it is okay to allow a pattern to be broken. Listen to it and do what sounds good to you. After all, the information above is interesting, and it might be useful, but you are writing YOUR poem.

While many biographers conclude that Poe's wife was the real Annabel Lee, it is also possible that she was a fictional character. Annabel Lee was the main figure being spoken of in the poem, but she could also be considered as a symbol of a rare, pure and tender love. There was something about her description that evokes innocence, purity and childlikeness (characteristics that Virginia Clemm possibly had). It is indeed strange that Poe, an orphan and drunkard who had experienced so much cruelty from life, should marry a thirteen year old sickly girl. Perhaps, in his mind, there was an undying ideal, a longing to find tenderness and innocence in a woman and become united with her. This ideal notion was symbolized by Annabel Lee, and if she was indeed Virginia Clemm, we can say that Clemm was the only true love that Poe ever had.

In the first line of the poem, we can read, “it was many and many a year ago, in a kingdom by the sea”. The sea here was used to represent the speaker's memory. The entire phrase suggests that Annabel Lee's death occurred a very long time ago, but the sea speaks of reminiscence and an undying memory of love. This particular pattern was repeated in the succeeding stanzas, where each time the “kingdom by the sea” was mentioned, there was also a mention of things which belonged to a distant past. Poe wrote in the second stanza, “I was a child and she was a child, in this kingdom by the sea”. At the time this poem was written, Poe cannot be considered a child, as he was way past his early twenties. Clearly, he was simply using the word "sea" as a vehicle to illustrate unfading memory of a loved one which cannot be erased by time. He seems to be implying that the memory of love he had for his woman cannot be erased even after the pain of loss and death. Thus at the end of the poem, we can find him staying beside the dead girl's sepulchre by the sea.

The poem suggests that the speaker's love for Annabel Lee was of such divine and everlasting nature that it disturbed divine creatures themselves. The jealousy of the “winged seraphs of heaven” speaks strongly about the magnitude of the couple's love for each other. Obviously, the love was too much (it was a love that was more than love) that the heavenly beings chose to inflict death on poor Annabel. It is possible that the “winged seraphs” personify ill fate, and the “highborn kinsman” represents God Himself. The reason for the jealousy was not explained in the poem. Either Poe merely used it as a plausible excuse to justify an untimely death, or he simply wanted to blame ill fate, or possibly God, for the loss of his love. Or perhaps, poet as he was, he was just trying to sound a little bit more poetic. We can only surmise, because only Poe, dead in his grave and his love long been buried, has all the answers to the questions that belie "Annabel Lee".

“Spring” is a free verse as it does not conform to any set rule. Though not once was the title mentioned in the poem, one finds himself thinking of this particular season. The poem speaks of “Birds' love and birds' song/ Flying here and there” which does evoke feelings of revival or renewal. One thinks of the return of the birds from the South, their beautiful songs of warmth, and their flight back to beloved trees that are coming into bloom. The third line repeats the first, then the fourth surprises you with, “And you with gold for hair!” This line tells you that the poem is not all about our flying friends. It speaks of an adored target (a woman comes to mind) with golden hair. A repeat of the first line once more, then the words, “Passing with the weather,” 7th and 8th lines read “Men's song and men's love/To love once and forever.”

Indeed? Tennyson seems to be saying that though the birds' flights, songs and love change with the weather, men's last forever. What was surprising was the word “once,” that to me connotes a first love that never did die. The second verse brings birds, men, and women together. Third and fourth lines of the second verse reads, “And you my wren with a crown of gold/You my queen of the wrens!” Here the feelings flow out. The poet gives his love a bird's name. A wren, curiously enough, is generally only of a dark brown plumage, but since wrens are considered songbirds, Tennyson obviously thought them a good enough species. It also emphasizes how special his love is-Queen of the wrens of their ordinary color, indeed! “You the queen of the wrens--/We'll be birds of a feather/I'll be King of the Queen of the wrens/And all in a nest together,” the final lines read.

His hopes all summarized into the last two lines-that in future he sees himself united in marriage with his love and building a home together. Tennyson, relaying pure emotion, talked here of Spring, of love, of songs of love. It's curious to note how Tennyson has more that one poem with Spring in its title. “Progress of Spring,” which speaks of man's hopes and likening it to Spring is another. Tennyson also once quoted: “In the Spring, a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.” So this poem is just Tennyson relaying his thoughts of love to his readers. No hidden lessons, just a light rendering of words.

On the other hand, “The Flower” goes a little further than “Spring.” It is what is called a Quatrain (a type of rhyming verse), having 4 lines with each line's last words rhyming interchangeably (1). The rhyming might make it seem childlike, but its message is not. It tells of a person who planted a seed, then “Up there came a flower/The people said, a weed.” Here begins a difference of opinion. He thinks it's a flower, others think it's a weed. The next lines speak of these same people going through his bower, “And muttering discontent/Cursed me and my flower.” A bower is basically an arbor, and this is usually within one's property. I would surmise that people had access to his bower and resisted strongly to the presence of a plant, that to them, ruined the scenery. But what happens next is curious.

“Then it grew so tall/It wore a crown of light/But thieves from o'er the wall/Stole the seed by night.” A change was wrought in that man's flower that it got the attention of wrong-doers. They didn't steal the flower though, but just the seed. What the thieves did with the seed was, in the words of Alice, even curiouser. The thieves sowed the seed “by every town and tower,” “Till all the people cried/Splendid is the Flower!” Here you see Tennyson's lesson starting to take shape. Once the flower was in abundance, it seemed most wonderful to behold. Just like how some material things that at first seemed irrelevant become valuable when your neighbors flashed them in front of you. So now, according to the poem, “And some are pretty enough/And some are poor indeed/And now again the people/Call it but a weed.” How insightful!

Once everybody could have easily acquired it, nobody wanted it once more. It cannot be denied that people easily put something down because of its unappealing look, if you will, then once others have it, change their minds. And Tennyson's poem goes full circle. What started as a weed that became a flower, came back to being regarded as the former. I loved the fact that Tennyson used the flower as a metaphor. A flower can be beautiful to some, superfluous to others. It is quite easily grown, and just as easily destroyed. Just as reputations or a good name is easily made and destroyed. You somehow feel that Tennyson was in a somber and reflective mood when he wrote this.

After a deeper examination of these poems, I do see a few similarities. One who reads this poem for the first time gets the feeling that they were written by the same author. Tennyson makes use of nature quite a number of times in his poems. Poems like “The Oak” and “Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal” are a few others that are nature-themed. “Spring” and “The Flower” are not the only ones where he incorporated nature into poetry, or where he used them as symbols. Birds like men, flowers like frivolities. He also used the word “crown” in both poems. A “crown of gold” from “Spring” and a “crown of light” from “The Flower.” His sense of imagery is the same throughout both poems.

The differences are stark, as well. Of course, the type of poetry used was different. In fact, Tennyson used quite a number of poetry styles for all his works, from ballads to free verse, from rhymes to odes (2). There is also the “mood.” There is a sense of exhilaration in “Spring” that one doesn't get in “The Flower.” Likewise, there's an air of “hear-this” in “The Flower” that is absent from “Spring.” There's a timbre of importance, of a lesson that MUST be learned. The use of symbolism was the same, but then again, quite different. In “Spring,” humans were likened to birds or vice versa. The feelings that were evoked by birds and songs were translated to human emotion. In “The Flower,” however, the inanimate thing (flower) was likened to still inanimate objects (material things, reputations, and such). But differences spell uniqueness, so they say.

Alfred Lord Tennyson suffered from extreme short-sightedness - without a monocle he could not even see to eat - which gave him considerable difficulty writing and reading, and this disability in part, accounts for his manner of creating poetry(3). We see his imagination come through because that was all he could do: imagine a world of color and shade. The poems we examined are just that-color and shade. Love came out so colorfully in “Spring,” while weeds of judgment darkened the page of “The Flower.”

The Anxious Dead by Canadian John McCrae delivers its message for increased gun control in a subtle yet effective way. Gun Control Equals Murder by American Bob Wallace is more upfront with its stance against gun control.

The moods of the two poems are also different. The Anxious Dead is a gloriously hopeful and optimistic poem that calls, almost pleadingly, for the end to war and gun violence. It does so in a tasteful manner. The poem still honours veterans' sacrifices and contributions to freedom and keeps “the faith for which they died”, but it also shows the imbecility that even after all this death and destruction “we still make war”. Canada's freedom was not won on the battlefield. It was won in the meeting room. Canadians view war and guns as unnecessary solutions to a conflict that could be solved without bloodshed, of course their poetry will reflect this attitude.

Gun Control Equals Murder is exactly the opposite. Instead of having an optimistic view of the future it has a pessimistic view of the past. The poem is based on the speaker's tale of two girls raped and murdered by a group of teenage boys. The speaker seems to be saying “if only”. “If only the girls had had a gun. If only I had been there to protect them”. The speaker thinks that “if those girls had even had a two shot derringer on them they would be alive today”. Just like the opinions these poems promote, the moods made are in stark contrast. The Canadians' hope that mankind will realize the error of his ways and put an end to guns is a mirror opposite of the Americans' regret at what happened because guns were not there. America's freedom was won on the battlefield. They view war and guns as solutions to a conflict because that has been what has worked for them. If it ain't broke why fix it?

Likewise, both poems get their meaning across in very different ways. The Anxious Dead uses four stanzas of “abab” rhymes to advocate gun control. It starts off with a recurring form of anaphora, “O guns”, which is repeated throughout the poem. Metonymy is used once in the poem, replacing “O guns” with “O flashing muzzles”. The speaker also uses archaic language when he says, “Bid them patient, and some day, anon,/They shall feel the earth enrapt in silence deep.” The use of this device gives the poem a timeless quality. It says, war was happening then and it is happening now. Anastrophe is employed in the line, “then let you mighty chorus witness be”, to maintain the rhyme. Allusion to Caesar is also used. The speaker's use of literary devices is meant to make the poem flow faster and sound sweeter. The speaker figures that the better it flows and the sweeter it sounds the more inspiring it will be.

Literary embellishments in Gun Control Equals Murder are less about style and more about atmosphere. The speaker creates a feeling of casual conversation with the reader by using similes such as, “I felt like I was two inches tall” or “I felt like I could have crawled into a mouse hole”. The speaker also uses satire to add some levity to what is otherwise a very grave subject. Overall, the speaker delivers his message in a benign, caring, and informal package, much like a friend giving advice to another friend. Both poems succeed in promoting their point, be it in a sweet symphony of words or a heartfelt suggestion from a friend.

The Anxious Dead uses the theme of war to promote its point on tightening up gun control because war is something that all Canadians fear and detest. If the speaker can show how brave soldiers with guns want only to exchange them for peace, then he can convince the fearful civilian to exchange his pistol for the greater good of man. The speaker does not blame soldiers for the death and destruction war has brought on to mankind. He, instead, encourages us to abolish war and guns as testament to all those who lost their lives because of it. “They [dead soldiers] shall feel earth enrapt in silence deep; shall greet, in wonderment, the quiet dawn, and in content may turn them to their sleep”. The speaker is saying that we must wake up from the dark and fearful night of war and embrace the glorious dawn of reconciliation. This and only this will bring our fallen soldiers final peace. Canadians are weary of war and guns, Americans not so much. While themes of war are appropriate for convincing Canadians of the merits of gun control, such themes will not work south of the border to convince Americans of the disadvantages of it.

What does work in persuading Americans is violence. War is violent, but because of what it has done for the advancement of American society they overlook that aspect of it. Unprovoked violence works best because unlike war, which has a point to it, unprovoked violence is pointless. The speaker for Gun Control Equals Murder understands this and uses the story of the rape and murder of two little innocent girls to pull on the heartstrings of Americans. No one can argue the fact that if those girls had had a gun they probably would still be alive today, but what would they have had to do with that gun to scare off their aggressors? Point the gun at them? Fire off a round? Shoot one of them? The speaker implies that only violence can counter violence. The hope being that the violence needed to counter will be less than what would have occurred had counter action never been taken.

This leads us to the unconditional hate shown by the speaker towards the teenage aggressors. His hatred of them is so strong that his fantasies about what he would have done had he been there are so well thought-out and planned that he even knows when he would have to reload his gun so he can finish shooting the little twerps in the knees. This is what he would have done to prevent the boys from murdering the two girls. This is his counter violence. His zeal with which he says this encourages Americans to believe that this is how we should counter violence. Some may not agree with his tactics but the sheer fierceness of them will prompt others to increase the ferocity of their counter violence, even if not to his level. The speaker has succeeded in his goal of convincing Americans on the disadvantages of gun control by appealing to their hearts and giving them reason to arm themselves so that they too, can counter violence.

To Canadians that notion is almost laughable. They believe that two wrongs do not make a right. On the other hand, Americans scoff at Canada's theory that fewer guns mean less crime. Americans think that fewer guns will, if anything, allow crime to flourish because people will not be able to defend themselves. The opinions expressed in Canadian and American poetry are different because Canadian and American ways of thinking are different. Our life makes us who we are. The same goes for countries. America and Canada are like two brothers. America, the eldest, had to fight for every bit freedom his parents granted him. Canada, the youngest, simply had to ask politely for freedom since his older brother had already cleared the way. Both brothers came from the same place, but the order in which they came has made all the difference.