Analyzing Poetry
Brittany Stephenson
Introduction
Poetry may seem intimidating at first, but once you learn some tools of analysis, hopefully you will find poetry to be a rich and enjoyable reading experience. Poets write to express their perspective on some aspect of their outer or inner world. Poetry is like a snapshot of a particular moment, experience, emotion or idea. The compact nature of its language use means that every word—even every syllable—carries meaning and weight. Poet and professor Gregory Orr puts it this way:
Poetry is both a “simple” use of language and a very complicated one. The reason poetry is so useful for emotional and spiritual expression—and for human survival—is that it is also a rich and complex use of language for creating order. Both the obvious and subtle orderings of poetry serve to hold words together—to forge them into solid but dynamic structures that contain and channel the chaotic inner and outer experience that we humans seek to express.
Getting Started
When you begin to work with a poem, start by reading it out loud. Read it according to the punctuation that appears (as opposed to the line breaks) in the sentences. After you’ve read it out loud a time or two, you want to determine three things:
- Who is the speaker?
- What is the situation?
- Is the poem narrative or lyric?
The speaker of the poem is “the voice or person imagined to be speaking the poem. It may or may not be the poet in an autobiographical sense, but the identity of the poem’s speaker is central to its meaning(s)” (Orr). You should describe the speaker in as much detail as you can. Let’s look at some examples:
“When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” by Walt Whitman
When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
The speaker here is a student who is attending a lecture on astronomy and who leaves the lecture in order to gaze at the sky.
Let’s look at another example:
“The Vacuum” by Howard Nemerov
The house is so quiet now
The vacuum cleaner sulks in the corner closet,Its bag limp as a stopped lung, its mouth
Grinning into the floor, maybe at my
Slovenly life, my dog-dead youth.
I’ve lived this way long enough,
But when my old woman died her soul
Went into that vacuum cleaner, and I can’t bear
To see the bag swell like a belly, eating the dust
And the woolen mice, and begin to howl
Because there is old filth everywhere
She used to crawl, in the corner and under the stair.
I know now how life is cheap as dirt,
And still the hungry, angry heart
Hangs on and howls, biting at air.
The speaker here is a man whose wife has recently died. He is sitting in the house thinking about and missing her.
Once you’ve established who the speaker is, you want to describe the situation and the antecedent scenario. The situation is literally the answer to the question “What is happening in the poem?” One strategy for determining the situation is to write the poem out in its sentences (as opposed to its line breaks), using the punctuation in the poem as a guide. (Be sure to save these sentences as we’ll be coming back to them later.) After you’ve written out and read the sentences, try to summarize the happenings of the poem in an outline form. You’ll also want to identify the antecedent scenario, which is what has happened before the poem begins. What has provoked the speaker into utterance? In “The Vacuum” the antecedent scenario is that a man’s wife has died. The situation is that he is sitting in the house noticing the silence and noticing the unused vacuum cleaner in the corner. He recognizes how “slovenly” his life has become, but he informs the reader that he can’t bear to use the vacuum cleaner because his wife’s soul lives in it. He then remembers his wife using the vacuum when she was alive and reflects on the grief of loss.
Next, you want to determine if the poem is narrative or lyric. A narrative poem tells a story. A narrative poem will have you as the reader asking questions such as “What happened next?” A narrative poem is like a forward-moving journey and tends to use lots of verbs. A lyric poem “constellates around a single center—usually an emotional center such as a single dominant feeling, though it could also be a dominant image, action or situation” (Orr). In other words, a narrative poem tells a story while a lyric poem explores a concept.
Digging Deeper
Now that you know who the speaker is, what the situation is, and whether the poem is narrative or lyric, let’s dig deeper into the language and sound of the poem in order to describe and analyze poetry in greater detail. Go back to the sentences you wrote out earlier. Start by marking the subject of each sentence, such as with an underline, then marking the verb of each sentence, such as with a double underline, then place any modifying phrases in brackets. Doing so will help you describe who is doing what in each part of the poem. You should also look at and describe how the words around the subject and verb modify (describe) the subject and verb. For example, let’s take a sentence from “The Vacuum”:
The vacuum cleaner sulks [in the corner closet], [its bag limp as a stopped lung], [its mouth grinning into the floor], [maybe at my slovenly life], [my dog-dead youth].
Go back to your sentences one more time. This time, compare the sentence to the line breaks. The line breaks, just like the sentences, are a unit of meaning, so ask yourself two things:
- What is the effect of ending the line here?
- Why might the poet choose to end the line here?
As you answer these questions consider things such as rhyme, rhythm, emphasis, repetition.
Now let’s turn our attention to the language and sound of poetry. (This would be a good time to read the poem out loud again.) Specifically, we’re going to talk about the following elements:
- Repetition: the formulaic repetition of phrases or words for rhythmic effect that either intensifies a statement or alerts the reader to different possible meanings
- Imagery: the language used in a poem to evoke sensory experience (such as sights, sounds, tastes, etc)
- Metaphor: a basic form of figurative language in which one thing is said to be another thing
- Symbolism: when a named object suggests a meaning beyond its literal meaning
- Alliteration: the repetition of an initial consonant sound of words in near proximity to one another
- Assonance: the repetition of a vowel sound within words in near proximity to one another
- Rhyme: when two words have the same final, stressed vowel sound and/or the same final consonant sound following it
Pay attention to the language the poet uses. Look for instances of repetition and ask yourself how the repetition creates or reinforces ideas and meanings. Going back to our first example, notice the repetition of “When I” in the opening of “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer.” In this case, the repetition of “When I, when I, when I” seems to reveal the boredom of the student in the lecture—an interpretation which fits with the overall meaning of the poem.
Next, pay attention to the imagery in the poem. What visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, or gustatory experiences are evoked by the language of the poem? Compare the images of the first part of “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” to the images in the second part of the poem. During the first part of the poem, when the speaker is bored, we have images of “proofs, figures, columns, charts, diagrams, and applause.” Once the speaker leaves the lecture and experiences the awe of the night sky, the images change to “moist night-air, silence, and the stars.” The contrasting imagery in the two sections of the poem helps solidify the speaker’s experience and communicates a primary meaning of the poem.
Let’s consider symbol and metaphor together as we look back to “The Vacuum.” In this poem, the vacuum is in fact a literal vacuum cleaner that the speaker’s wife used to use. But what else could the vacuum be? According to Wikipedia, “A vacuum is a space devoid of matter. The word is derived from the Latin adjective vacuus for ‘vacant’ or ‘void.’” Now reread the poem about the death of the speaker’s wife with this definition of vacuum in mind. Did you notice how the symbol/metaphor of a vacuum illustrates the void the speaker is feeling with his wife’s vacancy?
Finally, let’s consider the sound devices of alliteration, assonance, and rhyme. Go back to the poem and underline or highlight examples of each. Notice how the sound devices serve to reinforce units of meaning within a poem, binding together certain words, lines and ideas. As the sounds are bound together by alliteration, assonance and rhyme, so the meaning connections of those words become bound together (Vendler).
Conclusion
A close reading of a poem will help you understand more about that poem. Close reading entails multiple readings of the poem, both silently and out loud, along with other notetaking work:
- Establish the speaker, the situation and the antecedent scenario
- Establish whether the poem is narrative or lyric
- Write the poem out in its sentences
- Examine the grammar of the sentences—subject, verb, modifiers
- Compare the sentences to the line breaks
- Explore the language of the poem—repetition, imagery, metaphor, symbolism
- Explore the sound of the poem—alliteration, assonance, rhyme
Following a step-by-step analytic process such as this one will help you see the richness and depth of the poems you are reading. The more you understand about a poem, the more enjoyable your reading experience will be and the more confidence you will gain in working with poetry.
Works Cited
Orr, Gregory. A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. 2018.
Vendler, Helen. Poems. Poets. Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology. Third Edition. Bedford/St. Martin’s. 2010.
Nemerov, Howard. “The Vacuum.” Poetry Foundation.
Whitman, Walt. “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer.” Poetry Foundation.
