How To Analyse Poetry

BGS English Revision Podcast – Paper 1 – How to Analyse Poetry
General questions to ask about a poem…

1. Who is the speaker? What is the tone of the poem?
2. On a basic level what is the poem about / what happens?
3. How has the poet used language / sound patterns in the poem? What is the effect of this?
4. What is the effect of the form / structure of the poem?
5. What is the poet ultimately telling us / teaching us?
Language
• Archaic language – old fashioned language
• Connotations – what we associate with a particular image/word/idea (the opposite of
denotations which tells us what something means literally)
• Emotive words/imagery – words that evoke a particular emotion
• Imagery / symbolism – things that might function as symbols
• Imperatives – orders
• Irony – when the speaker says one thing and means another
• Metaphors / extended metaphors – (E.g. His eyes were oceans)
• Personification – giving human characteristics to an object (E.g. The sun smiled)
• Pun – a word with two meanings
• Pronouns – (E.g. I, me, we, she, he, it, you, they)
• Sensory Imagery– where the language is used to evoke the senses (sight, smell, touch,
taste, sound), can often include tactile (touch based) or musical (sound based)
language.
• Semantic fields – words that are all associated with one thing (E.g. ‘ball’, ‘Beckham’,
‘goal’, ‘goalkeeper’, ‘striker’, ‘Everton’ are all words from the semantic field of
football)
• Similes – saying something is like something else (E.g. Her eyes were like oceans)
• Synaesthesia– The overlapping and blending of senses ’he had a soft smile’ or ’she
had a fiery voice’
• Tone/Mood– The way a poem or speaker is intended to sound, often suggested by the
topic, content and structure. This can be very subjective and is often determined by
looking at the poem in its entirety.
• Words – nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs in the poem and the connotations they
have.
Structure / Sound patterns

• Alliteration– Words beginning with same letter sounds to create a notably emphasis
on words ‘dark dreary dreams’
• Assonance– Like alliteration, the sounds of assonance come from within the word
rather than the start ‘Fearful tears of misery’ (emphasis on the e-a-s sounds)
• Caesuras – a pause in the middle of the line
• Cacophony– Harsh sounds in order to make a discordant sound. ‘dark knuckles
wrapping across bricks’ (often Ks, Ts, Cks). (The opposite is euphony which means
pleasant sounds)
• Consonance– Consonant sounds at the end of words ‘wet set of regrets’
• Enjambment – no punctuation at the end of the line
• Meter – number of feet (beats) in the line
• Onomatopoeia– Words which sound like the effect they describe ‘splash, slap, crack’
• Plosives – ‘b’ and ‘p’ sounds
• Punctuation
• Repetition– Repeating words over a verse, stanza or poem to draw focus and add
emphasis (E.g. a refrain / anaphora)
• Rhyme– Words with similar ending sounds creating a music like effect or flow
‘theme/stream/dream’
• Rhythm– Organisation of words to create a noticeable sound or pace, not necessarily
musical but with a clear ‘beat’. Can include the structure of the work and is often
measured in syllables. Is it regular or irregular?
• Stanza lengths – number of lines in a verse
• Sibilance – repeated ‘s’ sounds
• Syntax – word order (E.g. you might comment on the unusual syntax of a poem)
Rhythm Meter
Iambic Da dum (the time of year) Monometer 1 beat
Trochaic Dum da (Tiger Tiger burning bright) Dimeter 2 beats
Spondaic Dum dum dum (cold gray stars) Trimeter 3 beats
Anapaestic Da da dum (and the sound of a voice) Tetrameter 4 beats
Dactylic Dum da da (half a league, half a Pentameter 5 beats
league)
Pyrrhic Da da da (the the the) Hexameter 6 beats
Heptameter 7 beats
Octameter 8 beats
Some Poetic Forms

• Ballad form – a poem which tells a story. Normally structured in quatrains (4 line
stanzas) of alternating tetrameter and trimeter lines.
• Blank verse – iambic pentameter without any rhymes
• Dramatic monologue – A poem in which a speaker addresses an imaginary listener.
• Free verse – a poem without any fixed meter, rhythm or rhyme.
• Sonnet – 14 lines long with a turning point (volta) in the 9th line of the poem.
• Villanelle – a 19 line poem made up of five triplets with a closing qutrain. It has two
refrains (choruses)—used in the first and third line of the opening stanza and then
alternately used at the close of each stanza until the final qutrain which concludes
with both refrains. (E.g. ‘Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night’).
• Top grade students will need to link together language and structure points and think about
what they tell us about the speaker / themes of the poem.

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BGS English Revision Podcast – Paper 1 – How to Analyse Poetry

General questions to ask about a poem…

Structure / Sound patterns

Some Poetic Forms

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