How to Analyse a Poem

How to Analyse a Poem? “

A poem should not mean But be” – Ars Poetica - Archibald MacLeish

o f poem it is. For example, lyric, sonnet, ballad, etc. Step 1: 1: Find out the type of given lines. Not all poems have rime in in Step 2: 2: Look for the rime/rhyme scheme or pattern in the given them. When two words end with the same sound they are said to rime. The following pairs of words are said to rime: deep/keep; send/bend; heat/meat. How to locate good rime? a) The vowel sounds must be the same. Thus day/pay; tree/free; high/ buy. b) The consonant sounds too must be the same. same. Thus: laid/paid; seat/beat; seat/beat; height/ bite; bite; port/thought. c) The syllables that rime should be those that bear a stress. Carefully pronounce the following pairs: feather/ proper; important/informant; respectable/ probable. They do NOT rime. d) The stressed syllables and the unstressed syllables at the end of two words must be the same if the words are to rime well. Thus: T hus: feather/weather; pretty/city; fountain/mountain. Complete the rimes in these lines: 1. Most little boys Make lots of n...... 2. On Monday morning I’m always y...... 3. The tree was a queen Dressed in garments of g...... Now try to do these ones without any initial letter to help you. 1. People say that the greed for gold Makes a man hard and cruel and ........ 2. In the quiet hour when night was falling I heard a bird from the tree-top ........ 3. She was young and so fair And jet-black shone her ........ Now look at this sonnet by John Keats:

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Cat! Who has passed thy grand climacteric,

a

How many mice and rats hast in thy days

b

Destroyed? – How many tit-bits stolen? Gaze

b

With those bright languid segments green, and prick 

a

Those velvet ears- but prithee do not stick 

a

Thy latent talons in me – and upraise

b

They gently mew – and tell me all thy frays

b

Of fish and mice, and rats and tender chick.

a

Find out the rime schemes in these lines. 1. Twinkle, twinkle little star, How I wonder what you are, Up above the world so high Like a diamond in the sky. 2. A cheek where grows More than a Morning Rose: Which to no Box his being owes. Lips, where all day A lover’s kiss may play, You carry nothing thence away.

Chaucer stanza also called ‘rhyme royal’ or ‘Troilus stanza’ is a seven-line stanza in iambic pentameters, rhyming ababbcc. It is the only seven-line English stanza to be used for serious verse. ‘Terza rima’ consisting of iambic (usually pentameter) tercets rhyming aba bcb cdc ded, etc. is illfitted to English. Yet many use this stanzaic form, including Shelley in his Ode to the West Wind. ‘Ottava rima ’ is a stanzaic form composed of eight lines of iambic pentameter rhyming abababcc. Though Boccaccio created the form it was made popular by Byron in his Don Juan. The form that  has been used in rustic or folk songs and now in light verse is ‘villanelle.’ It is a form composed of  nineteen lines of any length broken into six stanzas with five tercets and a concluding quatrain which contains two rhymes and two refrain lines. Step 3: Find out the rhythmic pattern in a poem. It is the metrical pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line of poetry. It must be remembered that English is a fairly heavily stressed language. The words that are stressed are the important ones: nouns, verbs, adjectives, and so on, whereas the articles, prepositions, and the ‘to’ of the infinitive are often scarcely stressed at all.

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Look at the rhythm of this line: I woke with a start in the middle of the night. Look also at the rhythm of this line: Come to the house and speak to my father. When a poet writes a poem he often tries to organise the rhythm into some sort of regular pattern. The commonest way of doing this is to try to get the same number of stresses in each line of the poem. In winter when the fields are white, I sing this song for your delight – In spring when woods are getting green,

I’ll try and tell you what I mean. In these lines we see that there is a regular alternate rise and fall of weak-strong, weak-strong. Now say thes e Byron’s lines smoothly and flowingly. She walks in beauty, like the night  Of cloudless climes and starry skies. Find out the metrical pattern in the following lines: 1. The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea The ploughman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness, and to me. 2. Sweet is the breath of Morn, her rising sweet, With charm of earliest birds; pleasant the Sun, When first on this delightful land he spreads His orient beams, on herb, tree, fruit and flowers. 3

Iambic – Unstressed – Stressed; Trochaic – Stressed – Unstressed; Spondee – Stressed – Stressed; Pyrrhic – Unstressed – Unstressed;  Anapaest  – Unstressed – Unstressed – Stressed; Dactyl – Stressed – Unstressed – Unstressed. Step 4: The next step is to look at some of the devices of language that a poet uses to his advantage. Though these devices are not exclusive to poetry the poet uses them with greater awareness and with conscious artistry. Devices of Comparison: Simile : The word ‘simile’ only means like. When the poet uses a simile he makes it plain to the reader that he is using a conscious comparison. He uses certain words: like, as, as though, as if, as...as, as...so. Let us look at a few examples: The poet Wordsworth describes a beautiful woman as: Fair as a star, when only one Is shining in the sky. Shakespeare comments on the passing of time and the shortness of life thus: Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, So do our minutes hasten to their end. John Milton describing Satan says: He above the rest  In shape and gesture proudly eminent, Stood like a tower. Wordsworth, in admiration of the greatness of Milton, wrote: Thy soul was like a star that dwelt apart; Though hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea. Metaphor : This type of comparison is often more subtle, more compressed and less obvious. The reader’s attention is not drawn to the comparison by any sign-posts such as ‘like’, as...as and so on. When Shakespeare said:

All the world’s a stage

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And all the men and women merely players. he was comparing the world to a stage and all the people in it to actors.

Another poet, struck by the varied beauty of a woman’s face, says: There is a garden in her face Where roses and white lilies grow.

To him the beauties of the woman’s face appear to be like flowers in a garden. The poet Wordsworth, looking at the great city of London in the early morning when everything is quiet, still and unmoving, says: Dear God! The very houses seem asleep And all that mighty heart is lying still.

Sometimes a metaphor can be compressed. For example, Shakespeare’s Cleopatra says: I am marble-constant. Personification : it is a special form of metaphor. In personification a non-human being is referred to as having the characteristics of a human. Read the following examples: 1. And the sunlight clasps the earth 2. The sea that bares her bosom to the moon. 3. Death lays his icy hands on kings. 4. Ten thousand saw I at a glance, Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

Step 5: There are three devices of sound which amplify the reader’s appreciation of the tonal quality of a poem. Alliteration – it is the repetition of like consonant sounds that usually appear at the beginning of  words but not always. In this line “Love laments loneliness” the alliterative sound is consonantal. In the poem The Ancient Mariner  the poet Coleridge describes a sailing-ship running before a good wind like this. The f air breeze blew, the white f oam f lew, The f urrow f ollowed f ree;

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We were the f irst that ever burst  Into that  silent  sea.

The repetition of the sounds of ‘f’, ‘b’, and ‘s’ give these lines their peculiar flavour. The poet Keats looking at the bubbles rising to the surface in a glass of wine says: With beaded bubbles winking at the brim. Assonance - it is the repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds. Here is an example: I would the white-cold heavy-plunging f oam, Whirled by the wind, had rolled me deep below Then when I left my home. The long deep vowel sounds in the words cold, foam, rolled, below, home, seem to echo in our ears and give us an impression of the boom and roar of the sea. In the following lines of poetry try to pick out the like vowel sounds that are repeated and attempt to explain what effect they have. 1. Full fathom five thy father lies. 2. Swift as the sparkle of a glancing star.

Onomatopoeia : In all languages there are words that imitate or echo sounds. In other words it  offers mimicry. Words like ‘meows’, ‘crash’, ‘bang’, ‘boom’, ‘zip’, ‘buzz’, ‘squeak’, and very many more are imitative sounds. Such sounds are also known as echoism. For example, Tennyson talks about: The moan of doves in immemorial elms,

Here the nasal sound ‘m’ is combined with the long, slow vowels convey to us the deep cooing of  doves. Similarly, in the following line Tennyson combines the nasal ‘m’ sound wit h different vowels to produce the buzzing of a multitude of bees. The murmur of innumerable bees. Alexander Pope talking about dull poets says: A needless Alexandrine ends the song Which like a wounded snake drags its slow length along. In the second line a reader can feel the slow painful movement of the snake in the slow movement  of the words. Step 6: There are some devices of grammar that add sophistication and quality to poetry writing. 6

Question : This is the simplest form. Some of the questions expect answers and some do not. William Blake portraying the strength, ferocity, and the beauty of the tiger asks: Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the lamb make thee? Here the poet is wondering whether the same creator who made the gentle and meek lamb made this terrible beast. In the following lines Shakespeare asks a question and then answers it.

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate. A question is often addressed to someone or something and here the poet questions the cuckoobird whose song has delighted him so much. O Cuckoo shall I call thee bird, Or but a wandering Voice? Address : in a poem, a poet addresses a living person or someone long dead or an abstraction or inanimate object. The term ‘apostrophe’ is also used alternately. Wordsworth lamenting over the state of England in his own days thinks of John Milton and says: Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour; England hath need of thee ... John Keats, knowing that his short life was drawing to an end (he died at the age of twenty five), wrote the following line in his last poem. Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art! John Donne chides the sun for reminding him and his loved one that another day has arrived: Busy old foole, unruly Sunne, Why dost thou thus, Through windows and through curtains call on us? The apostrophe is a convention appropriate to the ode and to the elegy. The invocation of a Muse in epic poetry is a special form of apostrophe. Repetition : it is a fundamental rhetorical unit in a poem wherein the words and sounds are repeated merely for the pleasure they give the ear. In songs and choruses a series of nonsense syllables are repeated at times. Look at Puck’s song in  A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

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Over hill, over dale, Thorough hush, thorough brier, Over park, over pale, Thorough flood, thorough fire, I do wander everywhere ...

The repetition of not only certain words like ‘over’ and ‘thorough’ , but also the repetition of  grammatical constructions, prepositions and nouns which give the song the movement. Milton imagines Samson, blind and dejected, saying these words: O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon, Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse, Without all hope of day.

The repetition of the word ‘dark’ in the lines conveys to the reader the complete dejection of  Samson and also the hopelessness of everlasting blindness. Ballads also have choruses and refrains in which phrases, lines and even groups of lines are repeated . A ‘refrain’ is repeated at the end of  each stanza and it may recur exactly in the same form. However, a ‘repetend’ is repeated only partially or at irregular intervals. Read this ballad stanza: O where have you been Lord Randal, my son? O where have you been, my handsome young man?

I’ve been to the wild wood, mother, make my bed soon, For I’m weary with hunting, and fain would lie down. You can see the repetition shows the mother’s concern for her son. Inversion : it is the inversion of the usual grammatical order of a sentence, clause or phrase in a poem. It is usually done for emphasis. The emphatic place for the English sentence is the beginning. For instance, a person might say, ‘Out of the door he came running like a madman.’ Sometimes, the rhythm of a line, or the rime needed at the end of it, is the reason for inversion.

A.H.Clough in his ‘Commandment for Modern Times’ says: Do not adultery commit: Advantage rarely comes of it. Writing about a soldier dying of his wounds in the terrible First World War, Wilfred Owen says: Move him into the sun ... 8

Gently its touch awoke him once, At home whispering of fields unsown ... John Milton is a great master of inversion. He uses it consciously to prolong the rhythm and to keep the reader’s mind following the sense on and on.

Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit  Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste Brought death into our world, and all our woe, With loss of Eden, till one greater Man Restore us, and regain the blissful seat, Sing, heavenly Muse ... Say where the inversion occurs in these following lines: 1. Than these November skies Is no sky lovelier. 2. Up the ash-tree climbs the ivy Up the ivy climbs the sun ... Ellipsis : It is the omission of certain words that are needed to complete a grammatical construction , but which can be understood from the context. Its main use is to contract the sense, to give pithiness to the expression and to avoid the use of unnecessary words. A poet, singing the praises of his loved one, says: Neat she is, no feather lighter; Bright she is, no daisy whiter. W.H.Davies, regretting the falseness of love, says; I loved a maid Time has proved false to be; Would death had come When true that maid to me. William Carlos Williams gives a sharply drawn picture of a cold day: By the road to the contagious hospital Under the surge of the blue 9

mottled clouds driven from the northeast – a cold wind. Step 7: Symbolism is very common in poetry and the student must be on the look-out for it. For example, Robert Herrick says in his poe m Daffodils: Fair Daffodils, we weep to see You haste away so soon; As yet the early-rising sun Has not attained its noon. The poet is not only talking about the daffodils, beautiful, short-lived flowers that bloom briefly in the springtime, but also about life. The flower which blooms, then quickly dies, becomes a symbol of life. James Shirley, thinking about death, the great leveller which spares no one, writes: There is no armour against fate; Death lays his icy hands on kings. Sceptre and crown Must tumble down And in the dust be equal made With the poor crooked scythe and spade.

‘Sceptre’ and ‘crown’ are symbols of the power of the rulers of the land. ‘Scythe’ and ‘spade’, two common farming implements, are symbols of the poor common, working man. So the poet is saying that death makes no distinction. The poet Louis MacNeice writes: The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall forever. He is not referring to a drinking-glass but to the glass tube that holds the mercury of a barometer. It  is actually the mercury in the glass that is falling, not the glass itself. *Please note that there are more ways of analysing a poem.

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