Poetry Is

(I tried to write this in the form of a poem, but the complex ideas therein don't lend themselves easily to poetry, and I am not wordsmith enough to craft it myself - not yet anyway - so I'm trying it in the form of prose instead. Maybe I'll rewrite this as poetry later on - there's something fulfilling about using poetry to express what poetry is)

Poetry is....
... crystallised speech.

If words in conversation easily flow, then in poetry, they are frozen and carefully sculpted.

And the analogies run deeper than initially thought. For the more a poet uses rhyme, rhythm and meter, the more regular it becomes, and so can be compared with a flawless gem, whereas the less one uses it, the less regular the end product will be, though even then in some cases there will always be beauty, as sometimes the uncut forms of gems sparkle as well. And as always, in cases where the regular nature of some gems serve only to highlight through contrast the chaotic elements elsewhere, so it is in poetry as well, where regular verse serves to contrast with and highlight irregular verse. And also, it might be that in looking at the way a gem is crafted and cut may leave some clues as to the identity of the craftsman, so it is with poetry, where every poet has their own style which naturally comes forth in their expression.

Finally, there is something more holistic in the analogy to consider as well, and this applies to all mediums of expression. This is the dichotomy of what the content is, versus how it is expressed. Consider the poem that has perfect rhyme, rhythm, and meter, but has nothing to say, versus a poem that has some important message, but is badly shaped. The analogy again fits here perfectly, where the perfectly formed but fruitless poem can be likened to an exquisitely shaped glass crystal, and the badly formed but valuable one can be likened to a raw, yet unshaped gem. And here, as always, what one wants is a perfectly shaped gem - a poem both complete in how it is structured as well as the message it contains.

But also, consider the following snippet, part of my failed attempt the poem, but which I include here for capturing a totally different facet of poetry:

...crafted, or hewn, from primitive ore,
words and feelings never expressed before
or so we feel, and come to believe,
not knowing that experiences past we relive
poetry capturing everything anew
as if we alone have tasted life's brew
not knowing others have seen it too
and in their own way captured it true
life goes on; the actors change;
the story remains the same...

50 points given to the first person to correctly guess what I am trying to say.