Tip Sheet on: Poetry Analysis

Poetry has many of the same elements as fiction: theme, narrator, setting, and characters. However poetry concentrates its elements in fewer words. Poets choose the words that they use very carefully. They delight in using figurative language, rhyme, imagery, and vocabulary that has more than one meaning.

Before focusing on specific poetic elements, here are a few steps to help acquaint you with the poem:
1. Look at the poem – are there any striking characteristics about the way it is set up? Do the lines/stanzas have a pattern?
2. Read the poem out loud – take note of the way it sounds. Does it have a certain rhythm to it?
3. After reading the poem and obtaining a general idea of what it is about, look at the title. How does the title relate to the poem?
Now it is time to analyze the five different components of the poem, (1) the speaker, (2) the structure, (3) the meaning, (4) the imagery and (5) the rhythm, meter and rhyme scheme.

Speaker
Understanding the Speaker is an essential component of poetry analysis. When looking at a poem, ask yourself the following questions:
1. Who is the speaker? Is it a male or female? An object? An historical figure?
2. To whom or what are they speaking? Is the speaker talking about someone? About the past? Present? Future?
3. What is the speaker’s tone? What is the speaker’s mood and how is it created? Is the poet reflective? Happy? Angry?

Structure
Examine the way the poem looks and is presented on the page.
1. How is the poem set up? Is it separated in to stanzas? Does it follow the pattern of one of the closed forms, such as sonnet, limerick, or haiku?
2. Is the poem in free verse?
3. How are the lines set up? Is there one word per line? Is the poem one continuous sentence?
4. How does the structure of the poem contribute to meaning?

Meaning
Now that you’ve determined the speaker and noted any special qualities about structure, read the poem for meaning.

1. As you’re reading, note any words that you do not know. After you’ve finished reading the poem, look these words up in a dictionary. This is important because poets choose each word on purpose, not only for its sound, but for the nuance of meaning or multiplicity or meanings a particular word has.
2. After you’ve looked up unfamiliar words, read the poem again as a whole. Try to determine the main idea of the poem - feel free to paraphrase in your own words.
3. You may want to treat the poem as a puzzle: First figure out the meaning of the first line in the first stanza, then the meaning of the second and so on. At the end of the stanza, figure out how the lines work together to create meaning. Jot this down and continue to do the same for the next stanza. After you have mini-summaries for each stanza, put them together to determine the larger meaning of the poem as a whole.

Imagery Not only do the words in a poem create a physical image on the page, but in their meaning and connection, they convey images to the reader.

1. The easiest images to pick out are similes and metaphors.
2. Look for words that reflect the five senses. Are there phrases and words that create a picture, sound, taste, feeling or smell in your mind? Are words used such as buzz or cuckoo (onomatopoeia) which imitates what they name?
3. Look for the repetition of colors, sounds, images, or specific sensory words. Repetition of certain words creates meaning and puts importance on those words that are repeated.

Rhythm, Meter and Rhyme Scheme The most effective way to find rhythm, meter and rhyme in a poem is to read it out loud.

1. Rhythm is the recurrence of stressed and unstressed sounds. Depending on
how the words are arranged in a poem, it can sound melodic or discordant,
fast or slow, etc. Rhythm’s what gives some poems their “sing-song” quality.
A recurring pattern of rhythm is called meter.
2. The rhyme scheme of a poem describes the pattern of end rhymes. Rhyme
schemes are mapped out by noting patterns of rhyme with small letters: the
first rhyme sound is designated a, the second b, the third c, and so on.

By the time you have read the poem six or seven times, and identified all the parts, you should be able to come to some basic conclusions. “Oftentimes the point will be a complex thing—a tension of forces between potentially opposed moods or images or ideas…A really good analysis covers the whole poem, uniting all its parts” (Padgett).