Poetry Explications

An Explication is an essay designed to analyze poetic techniques and then come to a conclusion on

theme/overall meaning of a poem. For the purposes of AP English, there are seven (7) sections in an

Explication, and for each reading, you will be assigned two of the following to write, present as a group,

and turn in at the close of class. Note that you will only be assigned paragraph one (1) and one of the

other (2-6) sections in class and everyone will write the seventh.

1 – Literal Meaning of Poem

What is the poem talking about?

Who are the subjects?

What action, if any, is taking place?

What is the speaker talking about?

This is where you discuss the basics - the who, what, where, and when. Don’t

worry about anything under the surface yet; that will come later. Make sure that

you begin with some type of introductory sentence, just as you would in a

normal essay.

2 – Speaker/Persona, Setting & Character

Who is the speaker in the poem? Go beyond just saying the poet. What is s/he

doing? What does s/he say about him/herself? About others?

What conclusions can you draw about occurrences involving the speaker that

took place before the poem begins? How reliable is the speaker as an observer

and reporter? What knowledge enables the speaker to make judgments and

opinions?

What do the speaker’s word choices reveal about his/her education and social

standing? How does the language reveal his/her assumptions?

From the situation given, create a character profile for the persona the poet is

taking when “speaking” the poem.

What is the setting and who are the other characters? How vividly does the poem

describe action, appearance, emotions, responses and ideas? How strong a picture

do you get of any other character(s)?

How does each significant character respond to the surroundings described and

implied in the poem?

What is the character trying to gain or learn?

How is the character(s) affected by others, and how do others respond to

her/him?

What degree of control does the character exert, and what does his/her effort

tell you?

How does the character(s) speak and behave, and what do you learn from

these words and actions?

3 – Diction & Figurative Language – (word choice, metaphors, similes, alliteration, assonance, etc…)

Diction & Word Choice – Is the level of diction in the poem elevated, neutral, or

informal; and how does this level affect your perception of the speaker, subject and

ideas?

What patterns of diction or syntax do you discover in the poem (consider words

related to situation, action, setting, or particular characters)? How ordinary or

unusual are these words? Which, if any are unusual enough to warrant further

examination?

Does the poem contain many “loaded” or connotative words in connection

with any single element, such as setting, speaker or theme?

Does the poem contain a large number of general and abstract or specific and

concrete words? What is the effect of these choices?

Does the poem contain dialect? Colloquialisms? Jargon? If so, how does this

special diction shape your response to the poem? What is the nature of the

poem’s syntax?

Is there any unusual word order? What seems to be the purpose or effect of

syntactic variations?

Has the poet used any striking patterns or sentence structure such as parallelism

or repetition? If so, what is the effect?

What figures of speech does the work contain? Where do they occur? Under what

circumstances? How extensive are they? How do you recognize them? Are they

signaled by single word or phrase, such as “desert places” in Frost’s “Desert Places”

(p. 947) ; or are they more extensively detailed, as in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30,

“When to the Sessions of Sweet Silent Thought” (p. 813)?

How vivid are the figures? How obvious? How unusual? What kind of effort is

needed to understand them in context?

Structurally, how are the figures developed? How do they rise out of the situation

envisioned in the poem?

To what degree are the figures integrated into the poem’s development of

ideas? How do they relate to other aspects of the poem?

Is one type of figure used in a particular section while another type

predominates in another section? Why?

If you have discovered a number of figures, what relationships can you find

among them (such as the judicial and financial connections in Shakespeare’s

“When to the Sessions of Sweet Silent Thought”)?

How do the figures of speech broaden, deepen, or otherwise assist in making

the ideas in the poem forceful?

In general, how appropriate and meaningful are the figures of speech in the

poem?

What effect do the figures have on the poem’s tone, and on your understanding

and appreciation of the poem?

4 – Imagery & Symbolism/Allusion

What type or types of images prevail in the work? Visual? Auditory? Olfactory?

Tactile? Gustatory? Kinetic or kinesthetic? Or is the imagery a combination?

To what degree do the images reflect either the poet’s actual observation or

the poet’s reading and knowledge of fields such as science or history?

How well do the images stand out? How vivid are they? How does the poet

make the images vivid?

Within a group of images – say, visual or auditory – do the images pertain to one

location or area rather than another (e.g., natural scenes rather than interiors,

snowy scenes rather than grassy ones, loud and harsh sounds rather than quiet

and soothing ones)?

What explanation is needed for the images? (Images might be derived from the

classics or the Bible, the Vietnam War or World War II, the behaviors of four-

footed creatures or birds or fish, and so on.)

What effect do the circumstances described in the poem (e.g., conditions of

brightness or darkness, warmth or cold) have on your responses to the images?

What purpose do you think the poet achieves by controlling these responses?

How well are the images integrated within the poem’s argument or

development?

Cultural or Universal Symbols – What symbols that you can characterize as cultural

or universal can you discover in names, object, places situation, or actions in the

poem (e.g., nightingales, hemlock, a thorn, two lovers, Bethlehem)?

How are these symbols used? What do they mean, both specifically, in the

poem, and universally, in a broader context? What would the poem be like

without the symbolic meaning?

Contextual Symbols – What contextual symbols can you locate in the poem (e.g.,

withered sedge, a flock of birds, a doe running into the woods)? How are these

symbols used specifically in the poem? What would the poem be like if the

contextual symbol were not taken to be symbolic?

What causes you to conclude that the symbols are truly symbolic? What is being

symbolized, what do the symbols mean? How definite or direct is the symbolism?

Is the symbolism used systematically throughout the poem, or is it used only

once? How does the symbolism affect the poem’s ideas or emotions?

Allusions – Granted your knowledge of literature, science, geography, television, the

Bible, film, popular culture, and other fields of knowledge, what allusions do you

recognize?

Do you find other references in these or other categories? What do the allusions

mean in their original context? What do they mean within the poem?

Do you see any possible allusions that you are not sure about? What help do you

find in the explanatory notes in the text you are using? Consult a dictionary, or

another reference work to discover the nature of these allusions.

For example:

In Macbeth, Macbeth says “Why should I play the Roman fool,

and die / On mine own sword” (V, viii, 1-2). This is an allusion to

how disgraced and beaten Roman generals would commit

suicide instead of being taken prisoner by the opposing force.

5 – Tone – The Creation of Attitude in Poetry

Be careful to note those elements of the work that touch particularly on attitudes or

authorial consideration. For example, you may be studying Hughes’s “Theme or

English B,” where it is necessary to consider the force of the poet’s claim for equality.

How serious is the claim? Does the speaker’s apparent matter-of-factness make him

seem less than enthusiastic? Or does this tone indicate that equality is so

fundamental a aright that its realization should be an everyday part of life? Devising

and answering such questions can help you understand the degree to which authors

show control of tone.

What is the speaker like? Is he or she intelligent, observant, friendly, idealistic,

realistic, trustworthy? How do you think you should respond to the speaker’s

characteristics?

Do all the speeches seem right for the speaker and situation? Are all descriptions

appropriate, all actions believable?

If the work is comic, at what is the comedy directed? At situations? At

characters? At the speaker him/herself? What is the poet’s apparent attitude

toward the comic objects?

Does the writer ask you to 1) sympathize with those in misfortune, 2) rejoice with

those who have found happiness, 3) lament the human condition, 4) become

angry against unfairness and inequality, 5) admire examples of noble human

behavior, or 6) have another appropriate emotional response?

Doe any words seem unusual or especially noteworthy, such as dialect,

polysyllabic words, foreign words or phrases that the author assumes you know,

or especially connotative words? What is the effect of such words on the poem’s

tone?

6 – Development – Prosody & Form

Because studying prosody requires a good deal of specific detail and description, it

is best to limit your study to a short poem or to a short passage from a longer poem.

A stanza of a lyric poem or a fragment from a long poem will often be sufficient.

Try to determine whether and how the prosody of a poem may be used as an

organizational element. In an Italian or Petrarchan sonnet, for example, the

rhymes are important in tying together the development of ideas, from the first

eight lines to the concluding six lines. In a Shakespearean sonnet there are three

4-line groups (quatrains), each containing the development of a particular idea

or image or symbol.

Determine the formal pattern of metrical feet and if there are any variations.

What are the effects of the variations? How does consistency or lack of

consistent meter affect the tone of the poem?

Look for alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia and rhyme. How does the use

of these forms of prosody emphasize some element of the poem?

Are rhyme schemes “heard” or are “sight rhymes” used? What effect does this

have on the flow of the poem.

The focus on prosody should reflect the most significant features of prosody in

relationship to some other element of the poem (such as speaker, tone, ideas,

etc…)

Closed Form – What is the principle meter? Line Length? Rhyme scheme? To what

extent do these establish and/or reinforce the form?

What is the form of each stanza or unit. How many stanzas or divisions does the

poem contain? How does the poem establish a pattern? How does the pattern

control the poem’s developing content?

What is the form of the poem (e.g., couple, tercet, ballad, villanelle, sonnet)? In

what ways is the poem traditional, and what variations does it introduce? What

is the effect of the variations?

How effectively does the structure create or reinforce the poem’s internal logic?

What topical, logical or thematic progressions unite the various parts of the

poem?

To what extend does the form organize the images of the poem? How does the

poet develop images within single units or stanzas? Do images recur in more

than one section? What is the purpose and effect of this recurrence?

To what extend does the form organize and bring out the poem’s ideas or

emotions?

Open Form – What does the poem look like on the page? What is the relationship of

its shape to its meaning?

How does the poet use variable line lengths, spaces, punctuation, capitalization,

and the like to shape the poem? How do these variables contribute to the

poem’s sense and impact?

What rhythms are built into the poem through language or typography? How

are these relevant to the poem’s content?

What is the poem’s progression of ideas, images, and/or emotions? How is the

logic created, and what does it contribute?

How does form or typography isolate or unite, and thus emphasize, various

words and phrases? What is the effect of such emphasis?

What patterns do you discover of words and sounds? To what degree do these

patterns create order and structure? How are they related to the sense of the

poem?

7 – Overall Meaning

It’s finally time to put everything together. You know the literal meaning of the poem,

you’ve thought about the speaker; the word choice & figurative language; imagery and

symbolism/allusion; tone and the development of sound and structure. Now, what do you

think the poet is trying to tell you? What does he want you to think about? What does He

want you to decide? What is the “big picture,” the true theme of the poem? Be sure to

reference some of the examples from previous paragraphs to prove your overall

theme/meaning/message.