Poetry Analysis Techniques

Poetry Analysis

• Focus Questions for Reading:
• What happens in the poem?
• What images do you visualize?
• What thoughts does it evoke?
• What is your emotional response?

Poetry Analysis Process

• Pre-Reading: Examine the title and form (if apparent).

• Focus 1: Literal Subject: Identify the poem's literal subject.

• Focus 2: Speaker & Attitude: Analyze the speaker's attitude towards the subject.

• Focus 3: Poetic Devices: Identify how devices shape tone, mood, and meaning. Consider figurative language, structure, and sound devices.

• Introductory Paragraph: The last sentence must be the thesis statement or main claim.

Poetic Forms

• Pastoral: Lyric poems praising the rustic life, often featuring shepherds.

• Sonnet: 14-line poems in iambic pentameter with a specific rhyme scheme (Petrarchan, Shakespearean, Spenserian).

• Stanzas:

• Couplet: 2 lines

• Quatrain: 4 lines

• Sestet: 6 lines

• Octave: 8 lines

• Volta: A shift in the poem's direction or thought.

Poetic Structure

• Syntax:
• End-stopped: Lines with pauses at the end, marked by punctuation.
• Caesura: Longer pauses, often near the line's middle, with punctuation.
• Enjambment: Run-on lines where the sense carries over to the next line.

Poetic Rhythm

• Meter: Regular rhythmic unit.

• Poetic Foot: Group of stressed and unstressed syllables

• Iamb: Unstressed-stressed ("hello")

• Trochee: Stressed-unstressed ("pickle")

• Meter Types:

• Tetrameter: 4 feet per line

• Pentameter: 5 feet per line

Poetic Sound Devices

• Rhyme:

• True Rhyme: Identical vowel and consonant sounds after the final stressed syllable

• Eye Rhyme: Words spelled alike but pronounced differently

• Slant Rhyme: Close but not exact rhyme correspondence (assonance or consonance)

• Alliteration: Repetition of initial consonant sounds.

• Assonance: Repetition of vowel sounds.

• Consonance: Repetition of consonant sounds within words (not at the beginning).