Re: poetry

lucasso wrote:
> but many languages have rules of stress or of endings that makest such
> poetry not possible, so how may look that poetry?
Old English used alliteration and beats.  If I remember correctly, their
poetry had lines with four beats (marked by stresses).  The first or
second always alliterated with the third.  Hebrew poetry used
parallellism (repetition of ideas), for example: "For the needy shall
not always be forgotten/nor the hope of the poor perish forever" (Ps
9:18) or "I will praise the Lord as long as I live/I will sing praises
to my God all my life long" (Ps 146:2), or antithetical verses, such as
"A wise child makes a glad father/but a foolish child is a mother's
grief" (Prov 10:1), or "A good tree cannot bear bad fruit/nor can a bad
tree bear good fruit" (Mt 7:18), as well as other forms of
parallellism.  The Bible occasionally also made use of a form of pun,
for example, in Isiah 5:7, he says that God looked for justice (mishpat)
and righteousness (sedhaqah) but found bloodshed (mispah) and the cry
(se'aqah) of the oppressed, and of course there's the famous example of
"You are Peter, and on this rock I will found my church" (rock and Peter
being identical in Aramaic and Greek, except for gender, IIRC).  Several
of the psalms used acrostics, Ps. 119, for example, is divided into 22
stanzas of 8 verses, each stanza represents a different Hebrew letter,
and each verse in each stanza starts with the same letter, so that
verses 1-8 all began with aleph, 9-16 with beth, and so on (which is why
it doesn't have much of a logical structure).

The Hebrew examples were taken from a section in the back of my Bible
(The Oxford Annotated Bible, NRSV translation)

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