Semantic Poetry
| No. of Players: | 1+ |
| Type of Game: | written |
| What you need: | pen, paper, dictionary |
Goal
To substitute words in a piece of writing with their dictionary definitions.
How to play
Players entertain themselves or others by replacing all or some of the words in a piece of poetry or prose writing with their dictionary definitions. Adding a limited number of additional words to make the result read better is optional. For instance, the famous line "Call me Ishmael" which opens Herman Melville's novel Moby Dick might now read as "Give a specified name to a speaker to refer to himself as a social outcast."
This game is similar to Word Substitution.
Example
Annie selects the final stanza of William Blake's poem 'The Tyger.'
Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
With her dictionary, she transforms this four-line stanza in four sections like so:
Very large solitary cat with yellow-brown coat striped with black, native to the forests of Asia
Very large solitary cat with yellow-brown coat striped with black, native to the forests of Asia
On fire, giving out or reflecting a lot of light,
In the large area covered with trees and underbrush of the period of darkness between sunset and sunrise:
What never dying terminal part of a person's arm beyond the wrist consisting of palm, fingers and thumb or organ of sight,
Have the necessary courage or boldness to form or make as by fitting and uniting parts together your fearful quality of being made up of exactly similar parts facing each other around a central axis?
