How to Understand a Poem

Prepared by Alejandra Menegol

Teaching Assistant

CDCL

What is a poem?

• In the most basic sense, poetry is any

type of literature that employs meter.

Meter is a rhythmic pattern created by

the number of syllables in the lines

(called verses).

• It is also a work that communicates

experience, ideas or emotions in an

imaginative style – using poetic

language.

How is poetry different from prose?

• Poetry suggests rather than openly saying.

• The message behind a poem is sometimes

not explicit. We must read beyond what it

says and focus on how it is said.

• The interpretation of poetry is almost

always subjective. It’s ok if we don’t fully

understand it.

Poetic Voice

• Who (or what) is speaking?

• Is it a person, an animal, or

thing?

• Is it male or female?

• Who is the voice speaking

to?

• The voice in the poem is

not necessarily the poet.

Eating Poetry

Ink runs from the corner of my mouth.

There is no happiness like mine.

I have been eating poetry.

The librarian does not believe what she sees.

Her eyes are sad

and she walks with her hands in her dress.

The poems are gone.

The light is dim.

the dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.

There eyeballs roll, the blond legs burn like brush. The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep. She does not understand. When I get on my knees and lick her hand, she screams.

I am a new man. I snarl at her and bark. I romp with joy in the bookish dark. Mark Strand

Who is the speaker in the poem?

How do you know?

Who is he or she speaking to?

Sensory images

Poets will often use language that

alludes to things we perceive

through our senses.

The purpose is to recreate these

experiences for the reader and

make them feel a certain way.

• Visual – appeal to the sense if sight

• Auditory – hearing

• Olfactory – smell

• Tactile – touch

• Gustatory – taste

• Thermal – physical sensations of hot or

cold

• Kinesthetic – physical sensations of movement

That Was Summer

Have you ever smelled summer?

Sure you have.

Remember that time

when you were tired of running

or doing nothing much

and you were hot

and you flopped right down on the ground?

Remember how the warm soil smelled

and the grass?

That was summer.

[…]

Marci Ridlon

What sensory images can you find in this passage?

Can you relate to the poet?

Figurative Language

Figurative language is a device used by the writer

to convey a certain perception of what he or

she is describing through comparisons,

exaggerations, imitating sounds, or mixing up

senses.

It is very common in poetry.

• Metaphor - when one concept is expressed in terms of another that is similar, to highlight a certain characteristic.

”I ride the horse that is the sea.

His mane of foam flows wild and free.”

• Simile – when a concept is compared to another. It uses words such as “like” “as” or “than.”

”The sun spun like

A tossed coin.”

• Personification – when objects, animals or concepts are given human traits, such as emotion.

“Shy words tiptoeing from mouth to ear.”

• Hyperbole – an exaggeration.

“His blue ox, Babe,/ pawed the ground/ till the earth/trembled

and shook/ and a high cliff / toppled and fell”

• Paradox – when ideas seem to contradict each other.

“I fear and hope, I burn and freeze like ice.”

• Oxymoron – like the paradox, but used in a single phrase.

“Parting is such sweet sorrow…”

• Pun or paronomasia – when the poet plays with words in a manner that they sound just like another word, but are meant to have another meaning.

“A dog not only has a fur coat but also pants.”

Daffodils

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high over vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the Milky Way,

They stretched in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

William Wordsworth

What figures of speech can you find in these verses?

Sound

• Poetry creates a certain musicality

as we read it, and poets achieve

this by arranging words in a manner

that they create beats – pauses.

• These beats and pauses are made

using meter and other rhythmic

devices.

Meter • Strict forms or poetry that follow a given number

of syllables with a series of strong and weak

sounds are called closed form.

• Examples:

– Sonnet: 14 lines of iambic pentameter and

one of these rhyme schemes:

• Italian or Petrarchan

(abba, abba, cdc, cdc)

• English or Shakespearean

(abab, cdcd, efef, gg)

– Iambic pentameter:

• An iambic foot is an unstressed syllable followed by

a stressed syllable:

• Pentameter means it consists of five feet.

• It sounds something like this:

da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM

Observe this rhyme and meter in the following example.

Sonnet 18

Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And Summer's lease hath all too short a date:

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And oft' is his gold complexion dimm'd;

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd:

But thy eternal Summer shall not fade

Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;

Nor shall Death brag thou wanderest in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou growest:

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

William Shakespeare

Limerick:

There was an Old Man in a boat,

Who said, 'I'm afloat, I'm afloat!'

When they said, 'No! you ain't!'

He was ready to faint,

That unhappy Old Man in a boat.

Edward Lear

• Poems that do not follow a

predetermined scene are called open

form or free verse. 1

1(a

le

af

fa

ll

s)

one

l

iness

e.e. cummings

Other rhythmic devices:

• Assonance – a repetition of identical vowel sounds

“And more to lull him in his slumber soft”

• Alliteration – a repetition of identical consonant sounds

“The flower-fed buffaloes”

• Repetition – the use of the same sounds, words or

phrases over and over

• Rhyme – the repetition of vowel and consonant sounds

at the ends of words or lines

• Onomatopoeia – words that imitate sounds

“the cheep-cheep of the birds”

“SWOOSH!”

“Boing!”

Intepretation

• Poetry is open to a personal

interpretation based on the reader’s

own experiences, memories and

knowledge.

• Sometimes the poet has a certain

intention, and we must try to be aware

of it. However, we should take

advantage of its subjectivity and come

up with our own meanings for it.

Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow. My little horse must think it queer To stop without a farmhouse near Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year. He gives his harness bells a shake To ask if there is some mistake. The only other sound's the sweep Of easy wind and downy flake. The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.

Robert Frost