Analyzing Poetry: Meaning, Speaker & Tone

Analyzing Poetry

Meaning and Theme

• Identify the poem's subject and central message.
• Consider the literal meaning, then any symbolic or allegorical interpretations.
• Symbolic/allegorical interpretations involve understanding characters, events, and objects representing a deeper meaning (moral, political, or religious).
• Consider the question: What does the poem say about human nature, society, or emotions?

Speaker and Tone

• Determine who is speaking: is it the narrator or the poet for example?
• Analyze the speaker's perspective and attitude toward the subject.
• Identify the tone (e.g., melancholic, ironic, reverent, bitter) and how it shifts throughout the poem.

Diction and Word Choice

• Look at connotation versus denotation
• Connotation refers to the implied meanings of words, while denotation is the literal meaning.
• Identify unusual words, formal/informal language, and archaic terms and consider how they contribute to meaning.

Imagery and Figurative Language

• Identify sensory details (visual, auditory, tactile, etc.).
• Look for similes, metaphors, personification, symbolism, hyperbole, paradox, and allusions aiming to uncover deeper meanings.

Structure and Form

• Consider the poem type: sonnet, villanelle, free verse, ode etc.
• Examine line length, stanza structure, rhyme scheme, and meter (e.g., iambic pentameter).
• Note any volta (shift in argument or tone), especially in sonnets.

Sound and Rhythm

• Identify rhyme schemes (e.g., ABAB, AABB, free verse).
• Examine alliteration, assonance, consonance, and onomatopoeia, and how they create sound effects.
• Analyze enjambment (lines flowing into the next), caesura (pauses), and punctuation and how they affect rhythm.

Syntax and Line Breaks

• Examine sentence structure and punctuation.
• Consider how line breaks, repetition, or parallel structure affect emphasis and pacing.

Mood and Atmosphere

• Analyze the reader's feelings that were created by the poem.
• Notice how tension, tranquility, nostalgia, or unease were created.

Literary and Historical Context

• Research the poet's background, era, and influences to enhance understanding.
• Consider whether the poem responds to historical events or literary traditions.

Ambiguity and Multiple Interpretations

• Poets often use ambiguity, irony, and paradox - stay open to multiple meanings.
• Avoid oversimplifying, instead explore contradictions and complexity in the poem's message.
• Consonance is a figure of speech in which the same consonant sound repeats within a group of words.

Consonance vs. Alliteration

• Alliteration, like consonance, involves the repetition of sounds, and their differences lie in two key respects: types and position of repeating sounds
• Consonance involves repetition of only consonant sounds; alliteration can involve either vowel or consonant sounds.
• Consonance repeating sounds can occur anywhere in a word, while alliteration repeating sounds must occur either in initial syllables or in stressed syllables of words.

Why Do Writers Use Consonance?

• Consonance makes words memorable and increases the sonic quality of words, encouraging more attention from the reader.
• It encourages readers to pay closer attention to language, slowing down the reading process and strengthening comprehension.
• It encourages repeated reading of a group of words, making poet's lines more dense with meaning.
• Consonant words can have special resonance, and can imitate the thing being described

Enjambment

• Enjambment is the continuation of a sentence or clause across a line break.
• The opposite of this is an end-stopped line where the end of a clause does fall at the end of the line

How To Tell If a Line is Enjambed

• Punctuation isn't a good guide - it is better to use syntax.
• Used to create suspense, control the rhythm, emphasize a word, create ambiguity, and vary sentences without having to vary line length

Caesura

• A pause that occurs within a line of poetry, usually marked by punctuation.
• It can be placed anywhere after the first word and before the last word of a line.

Ode

• Tends to serve as a tribute to a the poem's subject (person or inanimate object), it should be praised in a ceremonial manner.
• Odes are often short and lyric, conveying intense emotions, and tend to follow traditional verse structure with a formal tone.

Elegy

• Elegies are tributes to certain subjects, generally a person, and reflect on death and loss.
• Usually include a theme of mourning, sometimes with a sense of hope, through themes like redemption and consolation.
• Generally written in quatrains and in iambic pentameter, often with an ABAB rhyme scheme.

Villanelle

• Strict but more complex in form, they tend to have a fluid and lyrical feel due to lots of repeating lines.
• Villanelles consist of nineteen lines: five tercets and a closing quatrain, with a specific rhyme scheme. The tercets follow the ABA rhyme scheme, the quatrain's rhyme scheme is ABAA.

Sonnet

• Among the most popular poems, they are fourteen lines long and center on love.
• The rhyme scheme varies depending on the type of sonnet.
• Shakespearen sonnets have three quatrains and an ending couplet; quatrains have an ABCB rhyme scheme, the couplet has a DD rhyme scheme, and they are written in iambic pentameter.
• Petrarchan sonnets have one octave and one sestet with ABBA ABBA and CDE CDE rhyme schemes respectively.

Free Verse

• Appeals to those intimidated with strict forms.
• There aren't any rules, the poem can establish any rhythm, and rhyme is optional.

Sestina

• A complex French verse form that uses unrhymed lines.
• It has six sestets and an ending tercet.
• The ending words of each line from the first stanza are repeated in a different order as ending words in each of the subsequent five stanzas.

Acrostic

• Vertically spells out a name, word, or phrase, with each letter that begins each new line of a poem.

Ekphrastic

• Refers to any poem that uses a visual image or work of art as inspiration.
• It isn't about form, rigidity, or structure, but rather the connection between poetry and art.

Haiku

• Originated in Japan, it is a short form, and often refers to nature.
• They are three lines long, with the first line comprising of 5 syllables, the second line 7 syllables, and the final line 5 syllables.

Ballad

• A form of narrative verse, whose focus storytelling that is musical or poetic.
• Ballads typically follow the pattern of rhymed quatrains, which use a rhyme scheme of ABAB or ABCB, though the form is loose.

Lyric Poetry

• Centers around feelings and emotions.
• These poems are often short and expressive and tend to have a songlike quality to them and can use rhyming or free forms.
• It differs from epic and narrative poetry as the focus is on a feeling rather than a story.

Erasure / Blackout Poetry

• It is a form of found poetry, wherein you take an existing text and cross out or black out large portions of it.
• The idea is to create something new from what remains of the initial text, creating a dialogue between the new and the existing text.

Epics

• Very long poems which tell a story.
• They contain detailed adventures and extraordinary feats performed by characters (real or fictional) whom are often from a distant past.

Narrative Poetry

• Similar to epics but shorter in length and less focused on adventures and heroism.
• Instead they focus on plot over emotion, and tell fully developed stories from beginning to end.
• Traditionally told by one narrator or speaker, often with a formal rhyme scheme.

Limericks

• Short, comedic poems that are often crude.
• They are five line poems of a single stanza with an AABBA rhyme scheme.
• The first, second, and fifth lines tend to have 7-10 syllables, while the third and fourth lines tend to have 5-7 syllables.

Occasional Poetry

• Describes or comments on a particular event.
• They often written for a public reading, and their topics range from war to presidential inaugurations.

Pantoum

• A more complicated type of poetry, can be any length, and are composed of quatrains.
• Within these quatrains, the second and fourth lines of each stanza are used as the first and third lines of the following stanza.

Blank Verse

• Poetry written with a precise meter, often iambic pentameter, but it doesn't rhyme.

Prose Poetry

• Combines elements of the poetic form with those of the prose form.
• It uses meter, alliteration, repetition, rhyme, and rhythm but looks like prose.

Concrete Poetry

• Designed to create a particular shape or form on the page which echoes the poem's message.
• This form of poetry uses layout and spacing to emphasise certain themes.

Epitaph

• Similar to elegies, and are considerably shorter.
• The often appear on gravestones and can also include an element of humour. There also aren't strict rules regarding the rhyme scheme.

Palindrome Poetry

• Combines poetic form with palindromes, so the words reflect back upon themselves, hence why they are also referred to as mirror poems.

Diminishing Verse

• Remove the first letter of the end word in the previous line and then repeat it.
• They tend to be written in tercets with no other strict rules.

Echo Verse

• Repeats the end syllable of each line.
• This ending syllable can be repeated at the end of the same line, or it can be placed on its own line directly underneath it. Other than this repetition, this type of poetry doesn't follow any rules.

Close Reading / Explication

• Read the poem multiple times, aloud if possible.
• Underline key words, phrases, or repeated ideas.
• Consider diction (word choice), syntax (sentence structure), and punctuation

Thematic Analysis

• What big ideas does this poem explore? (e.g., death, love, isolation, power, nature)
• Look for symbols and motifs that reinforce themes.
• Consider how the poem's form, imagery, and tone contribute to the theme.

Structural / Formal Analysis

• Identify the type of poem (e.g., sonnet, free verse, ballad, villanelle).
• Look at the rhyme scheme and meter
• Consider line breaks, stanza divisions, and enjambment and how they create emphasis, suspense, or movement.

Sound and Musicality Analysis

• Poets use sound devices to enhance meaning, emotion, and rhythm.
• Identify alliteration, assonance, consonance, and onomatopoeia and how they affect the mood.
• Look for rhyme schemes and repetition and how they create unity or tension.
• Consider cadence and rhythm: how does the poem "sound" when read aloud?

Figurative Language Analysis

• Identify and interpret similes, metaphors, personification, and hyperbole in order to deeper meanings.
• Analyze symbolism with what objects, colors, or places might represent larger ideas.
• Look for paradox and irony and how contradictions reveal deeper truths.

Psychological Analysis

• Consider the speaker's emotional state—are they grieving, nostalgic, bitter, or delusional?
• Identify stream of consciousness or fragmented thoughts and how they reflect psychological distress.
• Examine any obsessions, fears, or anxieties in the poem.

Historical/Biographical Analysis

• Research the poet's life, beliefs, and experiences and determine their influence on the poem?
• Consider the historical context and what political, social, or literary movements shaped the poem?
• Analyze whether the poem responds to or critiques historical events.

Marxist, Feminist, or Post-Colonial Analysis

• Examine power dynamics, gender roles, and societal structures in poetry.
• Marxist: How does the poem reflect class struggles or economic power?
• Feminist: How are gender roles and expectations portrayed?
• Post-Colonial: How does the poem engage with themes of oppression, identity, or colonial history?
• Finally, combine methods for a richer more insightful interpretation.