 rowed him softer home—
Than Oars divide the Ocean,
Too silver for a seam—
Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon
Leap, plashless as they swim.
A poem is a verbal (words!) composition designed to convey experiences, ideas, or emotions in a vivid and imaginative way. It is characterized by condensed language chosen for sound and suggestive power and by the use of such literary techniques as meter, metaphor, and rhyme.
Must a poem rhyme? Is Parker’s “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses” a poem? Does it rhyme and have meter?
A limerick is an often bawdy (thinkNan tucket), nonsense poem of 5 anapestic lines. Two short syllables are followed by one long one, as in the word seventeen. Edward Lear (1812–1888) was an English artist, illustrator, author, and poet, renowned today primarily for his limericks. His most famous piece of nonsense, The Owl and the Pussycat (1867) was written for the children of his patron.
A ballad is a narrative poem, often of folk origin, intended to be sung, consisting of simple stanzas usually having a recurrent refrain. The Ballad of Typhoid Mary, for example.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote lyric poetry. A lyric poem is not narrative, not dramatic. It expresses subjective thoughts and feelings, often in a songlike style such as the sonnet, 14-line verse form. Poet Louise Bogan (1897-1970) believed that “Lyric poetry if it is at all authentic…is based on some emotion—on some occasion, on some real confrontation.”
Haiku is a very short Japanese lyric poem of l7 syllables,having 3 unrhymed lines of 5-7-5 syllables, traditionally invoking an aspect of nature or the seasons and often containing an indication of the season. For example, Kazue mizumura’s
An iced branch falls. 
I see the shattered moonlight Scatter at my feet. 
Figures of speech are used by poets to enhance their work-- to facilitate communication,
feeling, emotion. They are good stuff because they serve to seize our attention and to
inform, sometimes to persuade. Often, they’re simply a pleasant variation. Three of
the major figures of speech are alliteration, simile and metaphor.
Alliteration is the repetition of an initial sound in two or more words of a phrase or a line of poetry. It functions to appeal to the reader’s or listener’s ear, and to bind the phrase. For example, William Blake (1757-1827)’s
Tyger, Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
Simile is a figure of speech in which one thing is likened to another, dissimilar thing. Two essentially unlike things are compared, usually in a phrase introduced by like or as. For example, from Rita Dove’s WingfootLake(Independence Day, 1964):
“...the girls like young horses eyeing the track.” Metaphor is a figure of speech containing an implied comparison in which a word or phrase ordinarily and primarily used as one thing is applied to another, dissimilar thing, thus making an implicit comparison. It involves nonliteral use of words. For example, from Emily Dickinson’s “After great pain, a formal feeling comes:” the stiff heart / a quartz contentment / the hour of lead.
It is possible to overdo use of metaphors. “Come, Captain Age, With your great sea-chest full of treasure! Under the yellow and wrinkled tarpaulin Disclose the carved ivory And the sandalwood inlaid with pearl. Riches of wisdom and years?” (Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn [1876-1959] Contented at Forty, 1916.)
"Poetry helped me to be a little less stupid as I stumbled through the process," writes Rachel Hadas in Strange Relation: A Memoir of Marriage, Dementia and Poetry
(Paul Dry Books, 2010). The strange relation is Hadas’ spouse, victim at 61 of early onset dementia. As she negotiated the years before George moved to an assisted living facility, reading and writing became her life line. Just to help her manage, she says. "Poetry has always been a way of coping for me ... since my father died when I was 17, I've turned to poetry not only to express my feelings ... but consistently to figure out what I was feeling at a given time." Chapter 3: “ Into