Twitterature

@caneballante dancing dog             

oh brave daffodils

braving the frosty morning

first settlers of spring #haiku

             In the age of technologies and social media, the way in which we communicate and access information has significantly changed specially among younger generations. We are getting more and more used to immediateness. Social media have come to help us get information, news, even different types of literature in the blink of an eye. With just a click you can obtain almost anything you need. Twitter is the clearest example of how you can produce and obtain a literary piece in minutes, due to the fact that it is limited to 140 characters.
              The twit we are analysing here is an example of what we have just explained. It actually is a piece of literary twit in the form of a haiku. A haiku, derived from the Japanese word hokku meaning “starting verse,” is a specific type of Japanese poem which has 17 syllables divided into three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables. Haikus or haiku are typically written on the subject of nature.
                In this particular case, @caneballante or dancing dog has chosen daffodils, a flower to refer to an element of nature, which, as we mentioned above, is a recurrent topic in haikus. Some other elements which refer to nature are the frosty morning and the spring. As for the formal structure, following the typical structure of these poems, we find a poem of 5 syllables in the 1^st and last verses and 7 syllables in the middle verse. Finally, we can also see literary figures which are typical of poetry like the personification of inanimate objects. The poet gives the daffodils human qualities when in verse 1 it is said: “brave daffodils”.
                   All in all, as I see it, social media in general and twitter in particular enables us to produce and obtain new forms of literature, as we can see in the example above and, although they are limited in extension, their immediateness makes them the perfect means to go with the times.