How to use this handout: Having chosen a poem, ask as many
questions from as many relevant categories as you can, collecting the most
interesting evidence. Pay particular attention to areas of overlap.
Changes
Evaluate the changes or shifts in the poem: changes in diction, syntax,
form (meter, rhyme scheme, stanzas), speaker, mood, tone, metaphorical
register, image patterns.
How do changes or alterations in pattern work: by inversion, by contrast
emphasized by parallel structures, as a response to an event, or an image,
or as part of a dialogue?
Are the changes a part of an implied plot? Does tension build up?
If so, how is it released? Does the poem place change between equilibrium
and restored order?
Is there a sudden reversal, change of direction (peripety), or a drop
in level (bathos)?
Does the ending make a significant change?
Person, Speaker, Persona
Who is speaking, and to whom? Are names provided?
Do you have a sense of age, gender, rank, relationship?
What is the person of the address (first, second, third, plural and
singular)?
Is something/one absent being addressed? or something/one present?
Does the poem employ apostrophe?
What questions does the speech invite? What questions does it discourage
or prevent?
Is there more than one voice?
What motivates the speech? Does the utterance erupt out of a situation?
What is the purpose of the utterance?What other purposes does the speech
serve?
Is there a gap between the speaker’s intention and the implied intention
of the writer?
Diction
What is the most interesting word in the poem? Why?
Are the lines of the poem full of nouns? verbs?
What tense(s) does the poet employ?
Does the poem employ adjectives and/or adverbs?
Do the parts of speech employed suggest metaphors? (Many cliches work
this way: "It was a heavenly day!").
Does the poem contain words in a foreign language? Which language?
(Does a poem that quotes Latin differ from a poem that quotes Yiddish?)
Does the poem employ different kinds of diction in different places?
What is the register of the diction? abstract, Latinate, proverbial,
lowly, etc.?
Does the language include absolutes? comparisons? contrasts? tautologies?
Describe the tone of the poem? Does it change as diction changes?
Deixis
Does the poem suggest a “now” and a “then”?
Does the poem name a “here” and a “there”?
A “used-to-be” and a “soon-becoming”?
What relation does the speaker bear to these locations, times, or states?
Was the speaker in the “then and there” as well as the “here and now”?
How does the speaker feel about the change?
Does the poem look back into the past, or forward towards the future?
What attitude does the poem attach to that prospect?
Form
What can you observe about the physical appearance of the poem on the
page?
Is it in stanzas? verse paragraphs?Are they regular, or do they
change?
Are there patterns of repetition?
End rhymes? What is the rhyme scheme? Does it vary?
Rhythm? What is the meter and where do variations occur?
Alliteration, assonance, internal rhymes?
Are the lines end-stopped or enjambed?
How many sentences are there? Do the sentences coincide with
or differ from the lines?
Where do you get to breathe?
Can you find pauses (caesuras) within the lines?Do these pauses always
fall in the same place in each line?
Are there parallel structures or repetition of phrases?Do you find
instances of anaphora?
Can you see patterns of contrast, cause and effect, or other organizational
principles?
Are there items in a series? Where would further elaboration
of the series lead?
Why does the poem stop where it stops?
Imagery
What objects or images are named by the poem?
Are the objects or images related or unrelated to one another?
Are art objects described? (ecphrasis)
What attitude does the speaker have towards the objects or images?
Are the objects defamiliarized?
What kind of imagery is employed and how completely is it elaborated?
Is there a need to speak about a subject covertly, in code, elliptically
Does the comparison celebrate, elevate, or otherwise transform its
subject?
Metaphor, Simile, Metonymy, Synecdoche
Does the poem use similes in an explicit comparison, with the words
"like" or "as"?
Are the objects carrying a metaphorical burden? If so, what is the
"tenor" and what is its relationship to its "vehicle"? Where does this
relationship break down or become hard to untangle?
What kind of metaphors do you find in the poem?
Do the metaphors encourage an allegorical reading?
Does the metaphor go so far that it becomes farfetched? (catachresis)
Is the metaphor worked out in elaborate detail? (conceit)
Do the objects or images stand for related concepts, of part and whole?
(Look up metonymy and synecdoche)
Does the poem employ both metaphor (or simile) and metonymy?How are
the metaphors/metonymies related to one another?What motivates them?
The Five Senses
To what degree can the poem be visualized?
To what degree does the poem rely on aural effects?
Does the poem use onomatopoeia? alliteration? assonance? rhyme?
Given that the relationship between sounds and meaning is arbitrary,
to what degree does the poem suggest a relationship between particular
sounds and meaning?
Does the poem call on the senses of taste, smell, touch?
Does the poem employ synesthesia?
Rhetoric
What sorts of rhetorical devices are at work?Do you detect circumlocation?
(periphrasis)
Does the poem employ antithesis, bringing together constrasting
ideas?
Does the poem explore a paradox?
Does the poem use the figure of chiasmus, or a criss-crossing inversion
of words or phrases?
Does the poem rely on a riddle?
Does the poem deny what it is doing (litotes)?
Does the poem employ oxymorons, or condensed paradoxes?
Does the poem contain a proverb or a fable?
Does the poem illustrate its point with exempla (brief exenplary anecdotes)
?
Order, Argument, Plot, Closure
Does the poem move forward in steps that suggest an argument? Is it
logical? Is it persuasive?
Does the poem pose questions and provide replies?
Does the poem tell a story?
Do subsequent lines transform the way we understand earlier lines?
Describe the pace of the poem, after reading it aloud several times.
Does the poem have strong or weak closure?
Making judgments
What aesthetic values does the work embody or propose?
Does the work have a moral stance? Do you agree with its attitude?
Does the work participate in the discourses of psychology, theology,
patriotism, dissent?
Does the work have an implicit politics?
Is the work inflected by gender?
Does power operate in the work in a discernable way?
What are the work’s limitations? What can't it know, or admit?
How well integrated is the work?
Are there rough spots?
Is it uneven?
What is the worst thing about it?
What is the best thing about it?
Questions leading to interpretation
What does the work foreground?
What does the work let slip?
What does the work attempt to bury?
Is anything conspicuously absent?
Does the work, or a part of the work, resist interpretation? Where?
How? Why?
Of what kinds of discourse is the work comprised? Certain discourses
imply conceptual structures ("Our sublunary love" suggests the Ptolemaic
universe, for instance).
Does the work employ different kinds of discourse suggesting more than
one conceptual structure? What is their relationship? Do they clash? mesh?
suggest a development?
Conceptual structures may limit the extent of possible knowledge, making
some phenomena unrecognizable. Does the work pose an epistemological
problem?
Does the work present alternatives?
Does the work ask questions?
Does it use small questions to ask a serious, unstated question?
Where are the breaks? Breaks may appear at the level of the form, the
sentence, the imagery, the metaphor, the scene, the speaker, etc. and they
may work with or against one another.
Where are the knots? When does the language make the reader work, and
to what end?
Where does the work become unintelligible? Why?
What word or phrase marks the work's stress point(s)?
Does the work interpret itself?
Does the work make a statement about language, reading, or writing?
Resources
Unfamiliar vocabulary (italizicized terms) can be looked up in the following reference books:
The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms, Murfin
and Ray. Recommended.
A Glossary of Literary Terms, 7th ed., M. H. Abrams. Old
stand-by.
A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, Richard Lanham. Very clear and
helpful.
The Longman’s Dictionary of Poetic Terms, Myers and Simms.
Easy and clear.
Manual of English Prosody, George Saintsbury. Old but
great handbook on metrics.
The Princeton Encylopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger.
Very detailed and perhaps a little overwhelming, but a treasure-trove.