Poem analysis
Poetry Elements
List of Elements
Mode
Speaker, Tone, and Diction.
Irony
Symbol
Theme
List of Elements Continues
Words
Imagery
Figurative Language
Sound Devices
Rhythm
Form
Mode
Narrative
Dramatic
Lyrical
Speaker, Tone, Diction
Speaker: poet versus persona.
Tone: attitude of the speaker, mood of the work.
Diction: formal, standard, colloquial, or vulgate.
Practice: “I’m Nobody” by E. Dickinson
I'm nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody, too? Then there's a pair of us — don't tell! They'd banish us, you know.
How dreary to be somebody! How public, like a frog To tell your name the livelong day To an admiring bog!
Irony
Verbal
Dramatic
Cosmic
Point of view
Practice: “Titantic by” David Slavitt
Who does not love the Titanic?
If they sold passage tomorrow for that same crossing,
who would not buy?
To go down...We all go down, mostly
alone. But with crowds of people, friends, servants,
well fed, with music, with lights! Ah!
And the world, shocked, mourns, as it ought to do
and almost never does. There will be the books and movies
to remind our grandchildren who we were
and how we died, and give them a good cry.
Not so bad, after all. The cold
water is anesthetic and very quick.
The cries on all sides must be a comfort.
We all go: only a few, first class.
Symbol
An object or action that stands for something else and that has a significant meaning within the text.
Personal, cultural, and universal symbols.
Practice: The Road Not Taken by R. Frost
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same,
Practice: The Road Not Taken by R. Frost
And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I- I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.
Theme
The main idea or message that the poet is conveying.
There can be more than one theme.
The theme can be stated or implied.
Words
Abstract versus concrete
General versus specific
Connotative versus denotative
Word order may be significant.
Imagery
Words that evoke any of the senses:
See
Touch
Taste
Smell
Hear
Practice: “Preludes” by T.S. Elliot
The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o’clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.
Figurative Language
Metaphor
Simile
Personification
Metonymy
Synecdoche
Understatement or Overstatement
Paradox
Pun
Practice: The Eagle by A.L. Tennyson
He clasps the crag with crooked hands; Close to the sun in lonely lands, Ringed with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls; He watches from his mountain walls, And like a thunderbolt he falls.
Sound Devices
Alliteration
Assonance
Repetition of word; repeat and vary techniques.
Parallel construction.
Rhyme.
Words
Imagery
Figurative Language
Practice: “The Raven” by E.A. Poe
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore, While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. `'Tis some visitor,' I muttered, `tapping at my chamber door - Only this, and nothing more.' Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December, And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor. Eagerly I wished the morrow; - vainly I had sought to borrow From my books surcease of sorrow - sorrow for the lost Lenore - For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels named Lenore - Nameless here for evermore.
Meter
Iambic: an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable.
Trochaic: one stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable.
Anapest: two unstressed syllables followed by two stressed syllables.
Dactyl: one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables.
Meter
Repetition of Feet per line.
Monometer: one foot.
Dimeter: two feet.
Trimeter: three feet.
Tetrameter: four feet.
Pentameter: five feet.
Hexameter: six feet.
Heptameter: seven feet.
Octameter: eight feet.
Forms
Open and Closed
Examples of closed forms:
Sonnet
Sestina
Villanelle
Practice: “Corsons Inlet” by A.R. Ammons
I went for a walk over the dunes again this morning
to the sea,
then turned right along
the surf
rounded a naked headland
and returned
along the inlet shore: